Wittgenstein and Modernist Fiction: The Language of Acknowledgment

By Greg Chase

The early decades of the twentieth century were a period of major economic and cultural upheaval across Europe and America. Scholars have typically held that novelists responded to these shifts by questioning language’s capacity to picture the world accurately. But, even as modernist novels move away from a view of language as a means of gaining knowledge, they also underscore its capacity to grant acknowledgment; they treat words as tools for recognizing and responding to the inner lives of others. This book brings out this crucial feature of modernism by engaging with the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and with Stanley Cavell’s pioneering interpretation of Wittgenstein’s thought. The book shows how Wittgenstein’s interest in acknowledgment emerges over the course of his career-long effort to grapple with the same disorienting conditions of modern life that the experimental fiction of this period registers, including world wars, industrialization, and new conceptions of sexuality. It, then, argues that modernist novels by E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Nella Larsen, William Faulkner, and others exhibit a similar interest in language’s capacity to grant acknowledgment. These novels offer readers a way of hearing what Wittgenstein calls “the silent soliloquy of others,” giving us words by which we might acknowledge the otherwise unvoiced inner lives of socially marginalized figures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Feb 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781839980657

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Wittgenstein and Modernist Fiction

ANTHEM STUDIES IN WITTGENSTEIN

Anthem Studies in Wittgenstein publishes new and classic works on Wittgenstein and Wittgensteinian philosophy. This book series aims to bring Wittgenstein’s thought into the mainstream by highlighting its relevance to twenty-first century concerns. Titles include original monographs, themed edited volumes, forgotten classics, biographical works, and books intended to introduce Wittgenstein to the general public. The series is published in association with the British Wittgenstein Society.

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Series Editor

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Forthcoming Titles in the Series

Extending Hinge Epistemology

Logos and Life: Essays on Mind, Language and Ethics

Normativity, Meaning and Philosophy: Essays on Wittgenstein

Practical Rationality, Learning and Convention: Essays in the Philosophy of Education

Wittgenstein, Scepticism and Naturalism: Essays on the Later Philosophy

Wittgenstein and the Life We Live with Language

Wittgenstein, Human Beings and Conversation

Wittgenstein on Other Minds

Wittgenstein Rehinged

Wittgenstein and Modernist Fiction

The Language of Acknowledgment

Greg Chase

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Modernist Philosophy and Modernist Fiction

1.Who’s ‘We’?: Claims to Community in Forster’s Howards End and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway

2.The Silent Soliloquy of Others: Wittgenstein’s Pursuit of Acknowledgment

3.To See with the Same Eyes: Marriage and Same-Sex Intimacy in Ford, Woolf, and Larsen

4.Fragmenting Families, Private Language Fantasies: Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying

5.Seeing Humans as Humans: Wright’s Black Boy and Ellison’s Invisible Man

Conclusion: Afterlives of Acknowledgment

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would never have been written, let alone published, without the advice and support I received along the way from a number of excellent people. I am grateful to have an opportunity to put these debts into words—all the more so, given the subject matter of this book. Jack Matthews has always pointed me toward productive research questions and has read my work with care since my earliest days as a graduate student. I continue to admire Jack for the rigor of his scholarship, the generosity of his teaching, and the dryness of his humor—qualities I can only hope to emulate in my own life. Rob Chodat first introduced me to Stanley Cavell’s writings and helped me to see how ordinary language philosophy might be brought into conversation with twentieth-century literature. If there is any value in my own work across these two disciplines, it results from my attempts to follow his example. Juliet Floyd taught me how to read Wittgenstein and has always been an enthusiastic supporter of my work. Susan Mizruchi, Anita Patterson, Mo Lee, Aaron Fogel, Gene Jarrett, and Toril Moi have all provided thoughtful feedback that contributed to the development of this project. Jon Najarian, Patrick Whitmarsh, and Pardis Dabashi have been that rare thing: fellow scholars of modernism who are also genuine friends.

Constantine Sandis, Megan Greiving, and the entire staff at Anthem Press have been models of clarity and competency and have made the publication process go as smoothly as anyone has a right to expect. The anonymous readers provided illuminating responses to the book and helpful suggestions for revision. Thanks, too, to the College of the Holy Cross for awarding me a grant to help cover the costs of publication.

I would like to thank Twentieth-Century Literature for allowing me to reprint "Acknowledging Addie’s Pain: Language, Wittgenstein, and As I Lay Dying. I would also like to thank Johns Hopkins University Press for allowing me to reprint ‘Who’s We?’: Claims to Community in Howards End" (copyright 2020, The Johns Hopkins University Press). This article first appeared in Modernism/Modernity, volume 27, issue 4, November 2020, pages 823–45.

Other debts are more all-encompassing and thus harder to acknowledge adequately. Thank you to my parents, Marky and Gordon, for the great value they always placed on education; for teaching me how to be a teacher; and for being nothing but supportive of my impractical decision to pursue an advanced degree in English literature. Thanks to my sister Corina for providing the kind of perspective that can only be provided by someone with whom you have grown up. Most of all, thanks to Melissa. Every day, I look forward to hearing what you have to say. And thanks to Gwendolyn, who gives me hope that words will continue to matter and to convey meaning for years to come.

ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION: MODERNIST PHILOSOPHY AND MODERNIST FICTION

Literary scholars often assume that works of early twentieth-century fiction question the capacity of language to picture the world accurately. Formulating a now widely influential position, Frederic Jameson argues that modernist literature presents objective truth as a thing of the past and portrays every human subject as locked into his or her private language.¹ This conception of modernism finds much to recommend it in the period’s canonical works. In Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900), Marlow explains that whereas he had formerly been so sure of the power of words, his efforts to relate Jim’s story have made him afraid to speak; he perceive[s]‌ how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun.² The narrator of Jacob’s Room (1922) by Virginia Woolf writes of how masters of language, poets of long ages, have […] addressed themselves to the task of reaching, touching, penetrating the individual heart. Were it possible! But words have been used too often; touched and turned, and left exposed to the dust of the street (126).³ The titular character in Samuel Beckett’s Molloy (1955) voices a similar sentiment, commenting that every time I say, I said this […], or find myself compelled to attribute to others intelligible words […], I am merely complying with the convention that demands you either lie or hold your peace.⁴ Such moments indicate the emergence of a collective anxiety, among a range of writers, that the words at their disposal were no longer adequate to their expressive purposes.

It is undeniably true that modernist fiction is replete with expressions of mistrust about its own medium. But need we assume that the target of critique in such moments is always language itself? Consider the example of Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923). In the climactic scene of Kabnis, the work’s last and longest vignette, Toomer represents the dialect speech of a disaffected African American schoolteacher named Ralph Kabnis, who explains that he has been shapin words t fit m soul and expresses frustration that those at his disposal wont fit int th mold thats branded on m soul.⁵ Taken in isolation, this lamentation seems like another instance of the linguistic skepticism that supposedly typifies literary modernism. Indeed, one scholar has written that Cane illustrates the modernist severance of ‘word’ from ‘world’ and that it testifies to the price for which literary modernity is to be had: the fragmentation of the mimetic power of language.⁶ According to this view, Toomer follows Conrad and Woolf (and anticipates Beckett) in representing a series of alienated, monadlike⁷ subjects, unable to communicate with their interlocutors or to gain stable knowledge of the world beyond their minds.

But Kabnis’s skeptical sentiments are crucially qualified by a moment in Blood-Burning Moon, another of Cane’s vignettes. In this earlier passage, failures of language reflect particular forms of historical isolation, demanding a different understanding of how words work. The passage ventriloquizes the inner monologue of Bob Stone, a White descendant of slaveholders, as he reflects on his sexual relationship with Louisa, a Black woman who works for his family:

His family had lost ground. Hell no, his family still owned the niggers, practically. […] He was going to see Louisa to-night, and love her. She was lovely—in her way. Nigger way. What way was that? Damned if he knew. Must know. He’d known her long enough to know. Was there something about niggers that you couldnt know? Listening to them at church didnt tell you anything. […] Talking to them didnt tell you anything. (C, 34)

Toomer portrays Bob as frustrated that the physical intimacy of his sexual encounters with Louisa has left him unable to know her as he would like. One way of reading this passage would be to say that when Bob describes listening and talking as similarly ineffective modes of knowing, he sounds the widespread modernist theme of skepticism toward language’s epistemological capacities. But such a reading ignores a number of contextual factors crucial to understanding the passage—issues of race, gender, and power. In other words, such a reading does not reckon sufficiently with the historically situated nature of Bob’s linguistic skepticism. While the Stones can no longer profit from slavery, the economic power dynamics of the antebellum South nonetheless extend into this twentieth-century moment: White families like Bob’s still control the labor of Black workers like Louisa, who presumably earns exploitatively low wages. Louisa works for the Stones at a moment when many African Americans—fed up with the persistent economic inequalities they faced in Southern, rural spaces—headed for Northern centers of industry as part of the Great Migration. In both sexual and economic terms, Bob’s and Louisa’s lives are deeply enmeshed, and yet Bob perceives that a certain distance remains between them. Bob tries to make sense of this distance through his theory of essential racial difference—a theory that reflects his deeply entrenched, culturally conditioned racism. In so doing, he fails to consider the more granular differences in life experiences, political interests, communal loyalties, and expressive opportunities that would divide a working-class Black woman from a land-owning White man.

With his description of Bob’s interiority, Toomer lays bare the social conditions that inevitably shape modernist attitudes toward the epistemological capacities of language. Bob understands knowledge as a form of mastery. Responding to his anxiety over his family’s waning ability to control the lives of women like Louisa, he searches for—but cannot find—the words to capture some perfect or essential knowledge of her and her race. Bob’s lack of certainty concerning Louisa induces his linguistic skepticism: his experience has suggested to him that language cannot tell him everything he wants to know. Returning to the case of Kabnis, we begin to see that his own dissatisfactions with language cannot be understood separately from his bitter realization that he—an educated Northerner descended from a family of orators (C, 109)—remains a second-class citizen in Jim Crow Georgia. When Kabnis asserts that, despite White Southerners’ susceptibility to racial violence, they wouldnt touch a gentleman like himself, another Black character quickly disabuses him of this naïve view: Nigger’s a nigger down this away, Professor (C, 87). Kabnis cannot find the words to alter this state of affairs. Yet it is the state of affairs, not Kabnis’s words, Cane finally deems inadequate.

Though the field of modernist studies, like literary studies more broadly, has turned increasingly to historicist analysis in recent years, we literary scholars have remained unwilling to subject modernist attitudes toward language to this same historically informed scrutiny. To do so would be to recognize that words carry specific meanings in specific social situations, and that speakers who lament the inadequacy of linguistic expressiveness often reveal as much about their own particular circumstances as they do about the limits of language as such. This book aims to situate modernist fiction’s skepticism toward language in its fuller cultural and material contexts. Along the way, it revises the standard scholarly narrative of literary modernism, according to which material and social upheaval shatters stable paradigms of knowledge and ushers in an age of skepticism.⁸ I argue that even as signal works of modernist fiction move away from a view of language as a means of gaining knowledge, they underscore its capacity to grant acknowledgment. They show how language might matter less as a medium for representing reality than as a tool for responding to others. Examining novels by E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, Nella Larsen, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison, I contend that these writers engage in sustained investigations of language’s capacity to acknowledge the inner lives of other human beings. Such an understanding of language—as a vehicle by which we request and provide acknowledgment—is precisely what Bob Stone proves incapable of formulating.⁹

My understanding of acknowledgment is informed by the work of Stanley Cavell, and in particular by his influential reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. Wittgenstein was—in ways that remain underrecognized—a fabulist of modernity, crafting formally experimental works that were (as he wrote in 1919) strictly philosophical and at the same time literary.¹⁰ In the preface to Philosophical Investigations, written in 1945, Wittgenstein laments, It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work, in its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or another—but, of course, it is not likely. Worrying that he speaks an incommunicable language, Wittgenstein expresses his own version of the linguistic skepticism with which literary modernism contends. As with Toomer’s depiction of Bob Stone, Wittgenstein indicates that these doubts about his intelligibility have a historical basis, connecting them to the darkness of a moment in which widespread, nationally sponsored violence convulsed his world for the second time that century. But the Investigations ultimately pushes back against such skeptical doubts, offering a vision of language as a set of shared human practices.

Before I proceed, a word about the intended audience for this book: The Language of Acknowledgment is concerned with the relationship between aesthetic modernism and the material conditions of modernity over, roughly, the first half of the twentieth century. Wittgenstein, the primary focus of Chapter 2, is a constant presence throughout, and his role is twofold: first, I aim to show that his two major works, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) and Philosophical Investigations (1953), respond obliquely to the same disorienting conditions of modern life that the experimental fiction of this period registers. In this respect, my project seeks to build on and carry forward other recent monographs that have similarly sought to recuperate Wittgenstein’s reputation within modernist studies.¹¹ Second, I argue that 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, and I seek to bear out this claim by reading a series of modernist novels through the lens of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. In other words, the book traces the modernist impulses of Wittgenstein’s philosophical writings, and it does so in order to augment our understanding of literary modernism. Since, despite recent developments to the contrary, Wittgenstein continues to receive little attention in literary studies, in what follows I do not assume that readers have extensive prior knowledge of Wittgenstein’s thought. (Readers interested in additional discussion of the philosophical material the book covers are encouraged to consult the notes.)

I. Philosophy as a Historical Problem

The dates of Wittgenstein’s philosophical career correlate precisely with the years in which literary modernism took hold in Britain and America: Wittgenstein began studying philosophy with Bertrand Russell in 1911, the year after Forster published Howards End (1910), a work of proto-modernism and the first text I treat at length in the chapters to follow. Wittgenstein died in 1951, the year before Ellison published Invisible Man (1952), a work of second-generation modernism and the latest literary work I discuss. Six interrelated historical factors significantly affected the direction of both Wittgenstein’s life and modernist literary production: the emergence of a modern, capitalist economy; the First World War and the challenge it represented to Enlightenment rationalism; increased cross-cultural migration and encounter; new understandings of sexuality; the violent pursuit of White supremacist ideology, in both Europe and the United States; and the altered view of the human mind inaugurated by Freudian psychology. My aim in this section is to establish Wittgenstein as a historically representative modernist figure, whose philosophy develops alongside and in response to many of the same economic and cultural issues central to literary modernism.¹² After establishing the historically situated nature of Wittgenstein’s thought, I turn in the next section to an examination of how Cavell identifies the concept of acknowledgment as one of Wittgenstein’s major philosophical contributions.

The spread of modern, industrial capitalism is perhaps the overarching historical development relevant to this book, important in its own right but also for the range of additional changes it generates. As historian Sven Beckert argues, industrial capitalism proceeded out of a prior phase in capitalist development—what he terms war capitalism—characterized by the violent expropriation of land and labor.¹³ In its drive to maximize profitability, industrial capitalism extended the logic of this older system, but it also restructured relations between individual economic agents in significant ways. Across the nineteenth century, as technological advances made industrial labor more and more efficient, a generation of workers left behind their agricultural tools and headed to the factory.¹⁴ Jameson writes that human subjects constituted by modern capitalism were forced to reconceive the relation between language and lived experience, as the traditional contextual unity between words, places, bodies, and gestures broke down.¹⁵ Familiar words, uttered in familiar contexts, proved inadequate to capture modern experiences and sensations, and language entered a crisis of representation.¹⁶

Wittgenstein’s own biography registers the ambivalences inherent to this phase of capitalist growth and expansion, which undeniably raised the standard of living for many people across Europe and America, even as it also left many feeling disoriented and nostalgic for an older economic order. Ludwig’s father, Karl Wittgenstein, was a capitalist par excellence: upon joining an Austrian construction company in 1872, he quickly rose through the ranks, and a series of prescient investments made him, by the close of the nineteenth century, one of the wealthiest men in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.¹⁷ Ludwig, the youngest of eight children, initially played the part of a dutiful son, studying engineering at his father’s behest. But, as his biographer Ray Monk recounts, Wittgenstein increasingly found himself gripped, almost against his will, by philosophical questions (LW, 27). In 1911, he abandoned engineering and moved to Cambridge, where he began studying philosophy under Russell’s tutelage. In later years, Wittgenstein would describe himself as unsympathetic to the prevailing spirit of […] European and American civilization.¹⁸ In this same remark, written in 1930, he continues:

It is all one to me whether or not the typical western scientist understands or appreciates my work, since he will not in any case understand the spirit in which I write. Our civilization is characterized by the word progress. […] Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. […]

I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings.

So I am not aiming at the same target as the scientists and my way of thinking is different from theirs. (CV, 7)

Here, Wittgenstein emphasizes that, unlike his father, he is less interested in facilitating scientific and technological progress himself, and more interested in viewing the results of modernization from a critical distance, as well as in imagining what alternative possibilities might look like. Seen in this light, Wittgenstein’s repudiation of engineering in favor of philosophy signals his youthful realization that, rather than straightforwardly endorsing the goals of industrial capitalism, he would prefer to write about and reflect on its consequences.

Perhaps the single event that most dramatically laid bare the drawbacks to technological modernization was, of course, the First World War. As many scholars have noted, the Great War represented a devastating challenge to the sense of optimism long associated with Enlightenment thought.¹⁹ Politically, Britain began the twentieth century committed to the Enlightenment view of human beings as inherently rational creatures, capable of making logical choices that best serve the interests of both self and society.²⁰ In Morals in Evolution (1906), L. T. Hobhouse, a prominent proponent of this view, argues that ethical progress results from the rationalization of the moral code which, as society advances, becomes more clearly thought out and more consistently and comprehensively applied.²¹ Hobhouse envisions a direct correlation between an increasingly rational set of governmental policies and an increasingly just society. The outbreak of war, however, made it harder to believe either that humans inherently act rationally or that history inevitably is progressive. Hobhouse was quick to recognize the extent to which the war discredited the Enlightenment-inspired rationalism he had devoted his career to promoting: on August 8, 1914, four days after Britain declared war on Germany, he wrote to his sister, "All one’s hopes for social and political progress are shattered once and for all. […] We may write Finis to our work and hope that civilization rises again elsewhere."²²

The effects of the Great War on aesthetic modernism have been extensively chronicled. Yet many of the most canonical modernists experienced the disorienting consequences of war only indirectly: Forster worked for the Red Cross in Egypt, charged with gathering information on missing soldiers;²³ Woolf, who as a women was precluded from fighting, watched the catastrophe unfold from her home in London; Faulkner, who had dreams of becoming a fighter pilot, joined the Royal Canadian Air Force and never left North America, contrary to what he told people upon his return to Mississippi. As for Wittgenstein, he volunteered for the Austrian army and fought on the front lines of the Eastern Theater. While enlisted, he worked on the manuscript that would become his first book, the Tractatus. As I argue at greater length in Chapter 2, Wittgenstein’s wartime experiences crucially reshaped his philosophical commitments. For the moment, it is enough to pause over the image of this first-rate thinker stationed at the front, penning remarks in notebooks that would eventually be included in one of twentieth-century philosophy’s most influential books, and managing to avoid death by pure blind chance.²⁴ This image typifies the modernist period’s distinctive juxtaposition of brilliant intellectual and imaginative work with widespread violence, suffering, and death.

Prior to joining the Austrian army, Wittgenstein had been studying in England, meaning that he quickly found himself on the opposite side of the conflict as his British friends and acquaintances. After the war, he lived in Austria for much of the 1920s, before returning to Cambridge in 1929. Wittgenstein’s peregrinations bespeak a larger trend of greater geographical mobility and increased cross-cultural encounter in the early decades of the twentieth century, as waves of immigrants left Europe for the United States and many colonial subjects traveled to European metropolises. In the United States, millions of African Americans participated in the Great Migration, relocating from Southern to Northern spaces, and from rural to urban ones. Even as these individuals and families moved in response to the specific conditions of Jim Crow racial control, they also experienced the more generalized sense of urban alienation that Raymond Williams identifies as crucial to the development of aesthetic modernism.²⁵ As Michael North has discussed, increasingly frequent cross-cultural encounters exposed the contingency of belief systems and social practices, creating a situation wherein the multiplicity and incompatibility of human points of view were never more unavoidably obvious.²⁶ In the case of Wittgenstein, he never stopped feeling like a foreigner in England, finding that he could not fully confide in the people at Cambridge because, given the linguistic and cultural differences of which he was far more acutely conscious than they perhaps realized, he could not feel entirely sure that he would be understood (LW, 267).

Williams also notes another important consequence of the increased concentration of populations in modern metropolises, writing that small groups in any kind of divergence or dissent could find some kind of foothold, in ways that would not have been possible if the artists and thinkers composing them had been scattered in more traditional, closed societies.²⁷ One example of this phenomenon was the formation of increasingly visible queer communities in places like London and Harlem.²⁸ As Michel Foucault and Eve Sedgwick have both discussed, it was only in the late nineteenth century that homosexuality began to take hold in the popular imagination as a new mode of specification of individuals.²⁹ Influential works of sexology, like Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion (1897) and Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character (1903), helped to promote an understanding of homosexuality as resulting from an amalgamation of male and female elements.

In this instance as well, a broader cultural shift touched directly on questions that Wittgenstein was navigating himself. The youthful Wittgenstein was deeply influenced by Weininger, a fellow Vienna native who committed suicide at the age of 23, just a few months after publishing Sex and Character. Summarizing the nature of this influence, Monk writes: In […] its uncompromising view of the worthlessness of everything save the products of genius, and its conviction that sexuality is incompatible with the honesty that genius demands, there is much in Weininger’s work that chimes with attitudes we find Wittgenstein expressing time and again (LW, 25). In addition, Weininger’s view that all humans are bisexual seems to have made an impression on Wittgenstein, who participated in romantic relationships with a number of men while also proposing to one woman. These attachments tended to be spiritual, more than sexual; perhaps the most salient feature of Wittgenstein’s sexuality was how repulsed he was by any physical expression of sexual desire, homosexual or otherwise (LW, 585). When Wittgenstein did give in to physical desire, he felt that he had compromised himself ethically, as seen in this diary entry of his, written in 1937: "Lay with him [i.e., Francis Skinner, his lover at the time] two or three times. Always at first with the feeling that there was nothing wrong with it, then with shame" (qtd. in LW, 376). The woman Wittgenstein wished to marry, Marguerite Respinger, rebuffed his advances after he made clear to her that he wished for a Platonic, childless, marriage (258). These biographical details show Wittgenstein trying to determine what modes of sexual expression he found personally acceptable and fulfilling, against the backdrop of a modernizing world in which new understandings of sexuality were emerging, even as longstanding cultural hostilities toward any departure from traditional sexual mores remained powerfully in force.³⁰

Along with his sexuality, another aspect of Wittgenstein’s identity with which he grappled was his ethnicity: though he grew up in a secular, nominally Catholic household, three of his four grandparents were ethnically Jewish (4–8). As with his periodic pursuit of sexual gratification, Wittgenstein’s Jewish heritage functioned as a source of recurring shame and self-consciousness for him. His scattered remarks on being Jewish indicate the degree to which he had internalized his culture’s noxious anti-Semitism. Consider one example:

Amongst Jews genius is found only in the holy man. Even the greatest of Jewish thinkers is no more than talented. (Myself for instance.)

I think there is some truth in my idea that I really only think reproductively. I don’t believe I have ever invented a line of thinking, I have always taken one over from someone else. (CV, 18–19)

In this remark, Wittgenstein worries that his Jewish heritage prevents him from being a truly original thinker, expressing an attitude that sounds uncomfortably like a piece of Nazi propaganda.³¹

Wittgenstein penned the above remark in 1931, when it remained possible for him to conceive of his ethnicity primarily in terms of what effect it might have on his philosophy. Seven years later, the Anschluss raised the stakes dramatically: by the terms of the Nuremberg Laws, Wittgenstein and his siblings all counted as Jewish. Though Wittgenstein himself was able to avoid the worst consequences of this designation by becoming a British citizen, those siblings of his who still resided in Vienna found themselves in grave danger, and the Wittgensteins managed to forestall the prospect of internment in Nazi death camps only by making a deal with the German government, giving some financial assets to the state in exchange for having a second grandparent declared deutschblütig. The upshot of this deal was that Ludwig and his siblings now qualified as mixed blood (with two Jewish grandparents) rather than as Jewish (with three).³²

By dividing people into the categories of Jewish and German, the Nazi regime constructed and sought to enforce an oppressive fantasy of knowledge—a fantasy in the sense that such an ideology insists and relies on an illusory notion of absolute racial difference. In Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer describe Nazi ideology as the violent outgrowth of the Enlightenment tendency to categorize individuals as friend or foe, same or different.³³ The Holocaust, they argue, represents the acme of this tendency: The disregard for the subject makes things easy for the administration. Ethnic groups are transported to different latitudes; individuals labeled ‘Jew’ are dispatched to the gas chambers.³⁴ German race theorists and American White supremacists drew on a number of the same sources, and Jim Crow–era racial ideology was characterized by a similar anxiety about establishing and maintaining a rigid distinction between categories of people.³⁵ We have already seen one articulation of this oppressive epistemological fantasy in modernist literature with Bob Stone’s feeling that he must know Louisa, and works by Larsen, Wright, Ellison, Faulkner, and many others make a point to challenge and push back against the false logic of this destructive ideology.

Concomitant with these widespread economic and cultural changes, the emergence of Freudian psychology crucially influenced the intellectual climate in which Wittgenstein and the literary modernists lived and wrote. Wittgenstein’s upbringing in Vienna gave him a basic familiarity with Freudian psychology, as his elder sister Gretl was psychoanalyzed by Freud and became an early defender of his work (LW, 16). According to Rush Rhees, Wittgenstein himself read Freud around 1919, commenting that he was someone who had something to say.³⁶ It has long been established that many literary modernists were, to varying degrees, influenced by Freud—Woolf and her husband Leonard published his translated writings through Hogarth Press; Larsen read his work; and Faulkner heard a lot of talk about him—and their formally challenging representations of consciousness bear out a Freudian understanding of the human psyche as rife with internal conflict.³⁷

Freud’s account of the psyche revised longstanding conceptions of human perceptual and epistemological capacities. Charles Taylor gives an account of the intellectual history that gave rise to our modern, Western understanding of the self as inner, contrasted