A Different Order of Difficulty: Literature after Wittgenstein

351 Pages·2020·2.386 MB·English

by  Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé

A Different Order of Difficulty

A Different Order of Difficulty
Literature after Wittgenstein
Karen Zumhagen- Yekplé
The University of Chicago Press :: Chicago and London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2020 by The University of Chicago
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Published 2020
Printed in the United States of America
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isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 67701- 9 (cloth)
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 67715- 6 (paper)
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 67729- 3 (e- book)
doi: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226677293.001.0001
The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous
support of Tulane University toward the publication of this book.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Zumhagen-Yekplé, Karen, author.
Title: A different order of difficulty : literature after Wittgenstein /
Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé.
Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2020. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019032077 | isbn 9780226677019 (cloth) |
isbn 9780226677156 (paperback) | isbn 9780226677293 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889–1951. Tractatus
logico-philosophicus. | Modernism (Literature)—20th century—
Philosophy. | Ethics in literature.
Classification: LCC b3376.w563 t7389 2020 | ddc 192—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019032077
♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48- 1992
(Permanence of Paper).
To you, the bold searchers and researchers, and whoever embarks with cunning
sails on terrible seas— to you, drunk with riddles, glad of the twilight, whose soul
flutes lure astray to every whirlpool, because you do not want to grope along a
thread with cowardly hand; and where you can guess, you hate to deduce— to
you alone I tell the riddle that I saw, the vision of the loneliest.
friedrich nietzsche, “The Vision and the Riddle”
I have wandered to the limits of my understanding any number of times, out into
that desolation, that Horeb, that Kansas, and I’ve scared myself, too, a good
many times, leaving all landmarks behind me, or so it seemed. And it has been
among the true pleasures of my life. Night and light, silence and difficulty, it
seemed to me always rigorous and good.
marilynne robinson, Gilead
Getting hold of the difficulty deep down is what is hard.
Because if it is grasped near the surface it simply remains the difficulty it was.
It has to be pulled out by the roots; and that involves our beginning to think
about these things in a new way. The change is as decisive as, for example, that
from the alchemical to the chemical way of thinking. The new way of thinking is
what is so hard to establish.
Once the new way of thinking has been established, the old problems vanish;
indeed they become hard to recapture. For they go with our way of expressing
ourselves and, if we clothe ourselves in a new form of expression, the old prob-
lems are discarded along with the old garment.
ludwig wittgenstein, Culture and Value

Contents
Introduction: Difficulty, Ethical Teaching, and
Yearning for Transformation in Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus and Modernist Literature 1
1 Wittgenstein’s Puzzle: The Transformative
Ethics of the Tractatus 40
2 The Everyday’s Fabulous Beyond: Nonsense,
Parable, and the Ethics of the Liter ary in
Kafka and Wittgenstein 74
3 Woolf, Diamond, and the Difficulty of Reality 106
4 Wittgenstein, Joyce, and the Vanishing Problem
of Life 164
5 A New Life Is a New Life: Teaching,
Trans formation, and Tautology in Coetzee’s
Childhood of Jesus 216
Acknowledgments 277
Notes 281
Index 329

Introduction: Difficulty, Ethical Teaching, and
Yearning for Transformation in Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus and Modernist Literature
Did he find the problem . . . of . . . possible social and moral redemption . . .
easier of solution?
Of a different order of difficulty.
— James Joyce1
We understand by immersing ourselves and our intelligence in complexity . . .
the complexity of life.
— J. M. Coetzee2
Are you a bad philosopher then, if what you write is hard to understand? If you
were better you would make what is difficult easy to understand.—B ut who says
that’s possible?!
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians,
etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them—
that does not occur to them.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein3
Resolute Modernism
A Different Order of Difficulty argues that reading
modernist literature after Wittgenstein— that is, in light
of his contemporaneous writing, and in the wake of re­
cent scholarly thinking about his philosophy— allows for
a deeper understanding of the interwoven commitments
related to the concerns with difficulty, oblique ethical