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Wittgenstein on Aesthetic Understanding pp 99–129Cite as

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Is a Narrative a Something or a Nothing?

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Abstract

This paper examines how Wittgenstein’s remark that an inner sensation is “not a something, but not a nothing either” might help us understand certain prominent  theories of narrative. Some theorists argue or imply that “narrativity” is evident in what is depicted, and focus on actions, events, persons, significance, and other textual features. Other prominent theorists define narrative by the impact that an utterance or text has on an audience: narratives are said to induce an emotional or intellectual arc of some kind. What unites these disparate theories is a picture of a narrative as a something, an entity in need of strict definition and clear boundaries, and something that could even be scientifically explained and elucidated. Wittgenstein helps draw us away from the search, evident among both literary theorists and philosophers, for singular definitions of “narrative,” and allows us to recognize the sheer diversity of works and utterances to which we apply the concept.  

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1968) (Wittgenstein 1968). Throughout this essay I will follow the custom among Wittgenstein’s commentators of referring to the Investigations by section number (§), unless otherwise indicated.

  2. 2.

    That Wittgenstein is aiming to defeat the skeptic is the central claim of a number of readings of the Investigations, including some of its earliest commentators, and has found perhaps its most prominent articulation in the writings of Peter Hacker. The second view, that Wittgenstein is using the private-language argument to explore a persistent human anxiety, is associated with Stanley Cavell.

  3. 3.

    On Wittgenstein’s encounter with behaviorism in the late 1920s and early 30s, see G. P. Baker and P.M.S. Hacker, Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), Chap. 6 (Baker and Hacker 2009).

  4. 4.

    For a sense of this ongoing research, see, for instance, the websites for Project Narrative at Ohio State University (www.projectnarrative.osu.edu); the Center for Narrative Research at the University of East London (www.uel.ac.uk/cnr); or the Interdisciplinary Center for Narratology at the University of Hamburg (www.icn.uni-hamburg.de) (all accessed September 24, 2013). On the “narrative turn,” see Marie-Laure Ryan, “Toward a Definition of Narrative,” in Cambridge Companion to Narrative, ed. David Herman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 22–23 (henceforth cited parenthetically as “Toward”) (Ryan 2007); Monika Fludernik, “Histories of Narrative Theory (II): From Structuralism to the Present,” in James P. Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz, A Companion to Narrative Theory (Oxford: Blackwell’s, 2005), 43, 46–48 (henceforth cited parenthetically as “Histories”) (Fludernik 2005); Martin Kreiswirth, “Merely Telling Stories? Narrative and Knowledge in the Human Sciences,” Poetics Today 21 (2000): 293–318 (Kreiswirth 2000).

  5. 5.

    This classical/postclassical distinction also structures the first two chapters, by Herman and Monika Fludernik respectively, of Phelan and Rabinowitz’s Companion to Narrative Theory.

  6. 6.

    David Herman suggests that “postclassical” narratologists have been influenced by Wittgenstein’s (and J. L. Austin’s) claim that an utterance always occurs in a particular setting. (See his “Introduction” to the Cambridge Companion to Narrative, 14; henceforth cited parenthetically as “Introduction”); but he does not elaborate. One major exception to this claim about Wittgenstein’s absence in narrative theory is David Rudrum, whom I address in a later footnote, and whose writing on narrative gets the ball going in a much better direction.

  7. 7.

    Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 344 (Cavell 1979).

  8. 8.

    Mark Turner, The Literary Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 7 (Turner 1996); Jerome Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality,” Critical Inquiry 18 (1991), 5 (henceforth cited parenthetically as “Construction”) (Bruner 1991); Herman, “Introduction,” 3.

  9. 9.

    Barthes, Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 80–85 (Barthes 1977).

  10. 10.

    Fludernik, “Histories of Narrative Theory,” 49; Herman, Companion, 9, 11.

  11. 11.

    For a helpful guide to some of these terms, see the glossaries at the end of the Cambridge Companion to Narrative, ed. Herman, and The Narrative Reader, ed. Martin McQuillan (London: Routledge, 2000) (Herman 2000).

  12. 12.

    Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) (Genette 1982); Prince, “Remarks on Narrativity,” in Perspectives on Narratology: Papers from the Stockholm Symposium on Narratology, ed. Claes Wahlin (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1996), 95 (Prince 1996); Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative (Berlin: Mouton, 1982), 4 (Prince 1982).

  13. 13.

    Richardson, Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative (London: Associated University Presses, 1997), 106 (Richardson 1997); Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 19 (Abbott 2002) (henceforth cited parenthetically as CIN).

  14. 14.

    This point about the metaphysics of events is raised by Paisley Livingston in “Narrativity and Knowledge.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67 (2009), 26 (Livingston 2009).

  15. 15.

    Carroll, Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 128 (Carroll 2001); henceforth cited parenthetically as BA.

  16. 16.

    Tammi, “Against Narrative (‘A Boring Story’),” Partial Answers 4 (2006), 27–29 (Tammi 2006).

  17. 17.

    This example of the supermarket doors is adapted from John Haugeland’s discussion of the concept of “recognition” in his Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 272 (Haugeland 2000). Livingston raises similar questions about the ambiguities of “cause” in “Narrativity and Knowledge”; see 26–27 (Livingston 2009).

  18. 18.

    The Big Bang is Marie-Laure Ryan’s example in “Toward a Definition,” 30 (Ryan 2007).

  19. 19.

    Carroll, “Narrative Closure,” Philosophical Studies 135 (2007), 14 (Carroll 2007).

  20. 20.

    Velleman, “Narrative Explanation,” The Philosophical Review 112 (2003), 6 (Velleman 2003); henceforth cited parenthetically as NE.

  21. 21.

    For Herman’s invocations of Schank, see his Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 85, 90, 97–98 (Herman 2002).

  22. 22.

    The worries are also odd for someone whose claims are guided in part by DeSousa’s book, which is titled The Rationality of Emotions (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987) (DeSousa 1987), and which declares on the opening page that, “Despite a common prejudice, reason and emotion are not natural antagonists” (xv).

  23. 23.

    Burke, Counter-Statement (1931; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 38 (Burke 1931); henceforth cited parenthetically as CS.

  24. 24.

    Livingston, “Narrativity and Knowledge,” 32 (Livingston 2009).

  25. 25.

    Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions, 2007), 39 (Sartre 2007); White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990), 24–25 (White 1990).

  26. 26.

    Ryle, “Ordinary Language,” in Philosophy and Ordinary Language, ed. Charles E. Cason (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963), 108 (Ryle 1963).

  27. 27.

    Ryle’s examples are from “Ordinary Language,” 108–9 (Ryle 1963). My remark about “consciousness” is simply a way of saying that this word is typically an extension from the language-games in which we distinguish the sleeping person from the waking person (“He’s lost consciousness”) or distinguish an emerging state of self-awareness from a previous state of ignorance (“I wasn’t conscious of doing him harm”).

  28. 28.

    Or being guided: contrast being guided when blindfolded in a field, being guided by hand against your will, being guided by a partner in a dance, being guided by a friend on a casual walk (§§172–8). Or more central psychological terms such as “understanding” (see, e.g., §138 ff): contrast understanding algebra with understanding baseball, understanding one’s father, understanding life.

  29. 29.

    This mention of doing something well or badly may lead some people to ask whether evaluation plays any role in what I am saying here: whether, in other words, we might be better off shifting the discussion from “narrative vs. non-narrative” to “good vs. bad narratives.” Talking about good and bad narratives is not in itself a problem, and is something we intuitively do all the time. But such judgments will be made relative to a particular expectation and purpose: an excellent courtroom testimonial may be a terrible bedtime story for a child, and Homeric epic may be a bad narrative if you are a physicist describing the creation of a black hole.

  30. 30.

    As Hans-Johann Glock has pointed out in his discussion of the term “analytic philosophy,” Wittgenstein recognizes (in, e.g., §135) that particular branches of a family-resemblance concept could be united by necessary and sufficient conditions, even if the broader concept itself could not. Take, for instance, numbers: natural numbers, rational numbers, real numbers, and complex numbers may in themselves be defined analytically, even if, according to Wittgenstein, the more general term “number” is united only by family resemblances. See Glock, What is Analytic Philosophy? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 215 (Glock 2008). The example of numbers may lead one to think that a similar thing could be said of narratives: that specific types of narrative—the realist novel, the Hollywood action film—might be “precisely” defined even when we cannot do the same for “narrative.” But as I suggest briefly near the end of this essay, this claim is doubtful, and the concepts we apply to literary subgenres are best seen as themselves family-resemblance concepts. Indeed, the only “precise” concepts we might use for grouping together particular narratives are ones that in most cases carry only minimal critical or interpretive weight: narratives over 100,000 words; narratives set before 1800; narratives that include a blind beggar, etc. The fact that many true things about narratives are uninteresting to literary critics says something important about the nature of literary and humanistic study relative to the natural and even many social sciences.

  31. 31.

    On “projection,” see, in particular, Cavell’s Claim of Reason, 180–90 (Cavell 1979). On Cavell’s “projection” vs. the poststructuralist claim that concepts are “structurally indeterminate,” see Toril Moi, “They practice their trades in different worlds,” New Literary History 40 (2009): 801–24 (Moi 2009).

  32. 32.

    Hacker, Analytical Commentary, 215.

  33. 33.

    Here I should note a difference with David Rudrum, whose insightful article “From Narrative Representation to Narrative Use: Towards the Limits of Definition” (Narrative 13 (2005): 195–204) (Rudrum 2005) takes a Wittgensteinian stance toward “narrative” that is comparable to the one I am taking here. I am sympathetic with Rudrum’s overall position, but I also think he gives up far too much to the opposition when, responding to Ryan, he praises not only her claim that “narrative” is a scalar concept, but also her remark that “narrative” can be considered a “fuzzy set allowing different degrees of membership.” (See his “On the Very Idea of a Definition of Narrative: A Reply to Marie-Laure Ryan,” Narrative 14 (2006), 193 (Rudrum 2006)) “Narrative” may indeed be, as Ryan suggests, a “fuzzy set,” but the idea that it has “degrees of membership” implies a model of exactness and stable measurement that Rudrum should not want to grant. His concession is what leads a reader such as Pekka Tammi to overzealously pair Rudrum’s Wittgensteinian project with that of Fludernik cognitivism; see Tammi, “Against Narrative,” 24.

  34. 34.

    MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981) (MacIntyre 1981); henceforth cited parenthetically as AV.

  35. 35.

    See Taylor’s Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989) (Taylor 1981), especially Part One, which draws explicitly on MacIntyre’s notion of “narrative” and “quest”; Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), which focuses on the genre of the novel (Rorty 1989).

  36. 36.

    Strawson, “Against Narrativity,” Ratio 17 (2004): 428–52 (Strawson 2004); henceforth cited parenthetically as AN. For a similar, if more moderate, critique of the claims for narrative in recent philosophy, see Peter Lamarque, “On Not Expecting Too Much from Narrative,” Mind and Language 19 (2004): 393–408 (Lamarque 2004).

  37. 37.

    Sternberg, “How Narrativity Makes a Difference,” Narrative 9 (2001): 115 (Sternberg 2001).

  38. 38.

    On this point Herman and I agree, though for very different reasons. He laments researchers who “leave unspecified the exact scope of ‘narrative’ itself,” focusing “more on features of particular narrative genres than on general and basic traits of narrative itself.” As a result of such narrowing, he says, “the scope of ‘narrative’ expands and contracts according to the needs of the discussion.” “Narrative, Science, and Narrative Science,” in Narrative Theory: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. 4, ed. Mieke Bal (London: Routledge, 2004. 482–91), 383) (Herman 2004). By contrast, as I have suggested, I think “expanding” and “contracting” the scope of “narrative” according to “the needs of the discussion” is all we can—and all we need to—do.

  39. 39.

    It is this basic distinction between conceptual and empirical problems that makes me unable to make sense of Herman’s claim that “the science of narrative just is an ongoing effort to disentangle the meanings of story” (“Narrative, Science, and Narrative Science” 384-85).

  40. 40.

    Quoted in Hacker, Analytical Commentary, 33.

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  1. Department of English, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

    Robert Chodat

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  1. Bard College, US, Rhinebeck, New York, USA

    Garry L. Hagberg

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Chodat, R. (2017). Is a Narrative a Something or a Nothing?. In: Hagberg, G. (eds) Wittgenstein on Aesthetic Understanding. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40910-8_4

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