Understanding Literary Text from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigation

 

I. Introduction

Words and expressions employed in literature are quite different from our daily writings such as documentary and philosophical writings. The later ones aim to deliver a clear message so the words employed are definite and precise, and the format conforms to a clear and simple structure. However, this is not the case in literature. The unconventional usage of words and structures of text, which is called poetic expression, requires one's contemplation in order to understand. The poetic expression seems to violate our commonly agreed language rules at first glance but I would explain it is not the case by using Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophical view in his book of Philosophical Investigations (PI).

From PI , he claimed that, in most cases, the meaning of a word is its use in the language and many paradoxical questions arise due to misusing the language rules. He once said that “for philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.” (PI 38)Therefore, one may conclude that violating ordinary language rules in literature results in ambiguities and the literature will become senseless. However, using the framework provided by PI, I believe that we will understand better on how the literary expression delivers its message to readers.

In this essay, I will first describe the genres of literature, then explain how an understanding of a literary text is possible and finally argue why poetic expression is necessary for literature.


Genres of Literature
Literature is very special as its aim is not to explain an argument nor to teach readers skills so it seems to have no purposes at all. Furthermore, literature employs many words that are referring abstract ideas and arranges them strangely. Sometimes, sentences even don't conform to grammar, which readers have to contemplate a lot during reading. However, upon contemplation, readers usually grasp the meaning of the text.

A literary text is mainly divided into three categories: Poem, Novel and Prose. As drama also consider acting as a necessary constituent of itself for delivering meaning. Therefore, I will not include this genre in the following discussion. To start with, I will focus on prose which its language is largely conformed to our ordinary use of words (i.e. poetic expression is rarely found).



II. Understanding the Context of Prose
Prose aims to depict a real-life experience, a landscape or an event by using correctly grammatical sentences so it is easy to read. Therefore, understanding the text of prose is the same as understanding the text of other ordinary writing. In order to understand a text, we have to understand its sentences first which means we have to start understanding how words give meaning to us at the beginning.

Meaning and Use in Language
In PI, Wittgenstein spent a lot of paragraphs explaining the meaning of understanding a word. He first pointed out that people fall into the trap of Augustinian picture(i.e. meaning of every word is correlated to a physical object). He refuted this theory and argued that the Augustinian statement (PI 1) is just ostensive teaching instead of demonstrating a definite relationship between words and objects existing in the reality. For example, the word “five” cannot be denoted by any objects in the word. Instead, Wittgenstein said that the meaning of a word is its use in the language in most cases, rather than the pointed bearers:-

“For a large class of cases – though not for all-in which we employ the word “meaning” it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language. And the meaning of a name is sometimes explained by pointing to its bearer.” (PI 43)

It is important that readers understand that the meaning of the words is not always corresponding to actual objects in reality, otherwise, we will keep looking for physical objects in the world and such an attempt is deemed to fail. Some people may argue that although there may not be a physical object in the world corresponding to each word, there are some inner intangible objects which correlate to our inner state. However, this view is also a misconception and I will discuss it in the latter part. What Wittgenstein suggesting is that words can be understood either from their use and their bearer. The use means the applications of words that we mutually adopt in our daily lives. For example, “five” is used as an adjective so we say that there are five apples rather there are five; and we never expect that we can find an object representing “five” in the reality. Therefore, from this example, somehow it implies that the use is related to our customs. (i.e. our form of life)

Form of Life
Even understanding the meaning of a word doesn't mean we understand a sentence. The understanding of a sentence depends on the circumstances we are in. For example, “Bring a slab" can be interpreted as a description, a report or an order. Therefore, how we interpret the sentence will depend on the background where the sentence is spoken and our experience (i.e. the whole context). He argued that the understanding of words depends on one’s understanding of a particular form of life as language is a form of life: “language game is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or a form of life.” (PI 23)

In PI 23, he demonstrated his argument by stating different kinds of sentences and listing different kinds of language games in our daily life. For example, “reporting an event-, making up a story; and reading it - , guessing a riddle-, solving a problem in practical arithmetic-“. (PI 23)

These examples demonstrate that the language we used in every day has multiple usages, basing on our undertaking activities in our daily lives. Therefore, without a proper understanding of the form of life of a specific group of people, one will not understand the language used by those people. For example, if the “Bring a slab” sentence appears in the scene of two people carrying out construction, we will interpret it as an order. However, if it appears in a place where constructions no longer require any human power, the sentence may be interpreted as a description of an action or even an imitative game played among children.


III. Understanding the Context of Novel
The novel portrays a story, which may be actual or frictional, so it is descriptive more than normative. Usually, the experiences and living conditions undertaken by characters are depicted in great detail in a story. A problem arises here: How can we understand the psychological state of other people, such as sensation, through the text? This problem seems to be unsolvable if one insists that there are mental objects or inner pictures correlating to the words of sensation as one may doubt whether the pain felt by the character is the same kind of sensation existing in him or he may doubt whether he has the same intensity of pain as the character. Such doubt will disconnect the readers from the text and prevent us from understanding the text.

Wittgenstein argued that pain is neither an inner picture nor a private sample. He used beetle in a box as an analogy to sensation (PI 293) to justify that sensation words should not correlate to any inner objects, which in fact do not exist. The situation of the beetle-in-a-box is that there is nobody can look into another person’s box so no one can guarantee the object inside each person’s box is the same. So as to say, the object in each person’s box may be different or the box is even empty. Therefore, the word “beetle” will be meaningless if the "beetle" must depend on an object which requires to be the same in each person’s box. So the words of sensation are not referring to our mental objects. In fact, Wittgenstein argued that the words of sensation are an expression of our sensation which partially replaces our behavior induced by sensation. For example, when our leg is hit, we may say “I am in pain”, we replace our crying with the word “pain”. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein does not mean that sensation does not exist, it is just the sensation pain that goes into the language game as a form of an image which is not expressible. "And yet you again and again reach the conclusion that the sensation itself is a nothing"— Not at all. It is not a something, but not a nothing either! The conclusion was only that a nothing would serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said.” (PI 304)


Understanding of Sensation Words
The sensation language game works like this: An event arises our sensation (e.g. pain) firstly, then we feel the sensation (pain) and we express it into behavior (e.g. crying and screaming). However, due to the complicity of our form of life, the sensation language game does not serve only as an expression of sensation, it can be a disguise of sensation or a mere report of a past situation. (Below Figure refers)





Therefore, the assessment of the character’s physiological state depends on the context and the background where the character is in. For example, if the character hasn’t undertaken any injuries but claiming he is in pain, the readers can judge that the character is telling a lie. If one does not judge properly from the information provided by the context, one may misinterpret the disguise of character as a genuine expression of pain, thus misunderstand the psychological state of the character.

Wittgenstein’s analysis also provides a framework for explaining why our sensations and emotion arise during reading literature. It is because the sensation of the character indeed can be felt by the readers not by introspection of our inner sensation objects but by recalling our past experiences. From the discussion above, the sensation goes into the language game in a form of the image so the character indeed feels something when they express their sensation. When we try to understand the sensation felt by the character, we should not introspect ourselves as there is no legitimate proof that one's own pain is the same as the character’s pain. Instead, the image of sensation should be found by recalling the memory of related scenes and experiencing that sensation. This is somehow similar to enact an injury to a person for teaching him how to use the word “pain”. (PI 288)

Using pain as an example, to understand the sensation pain, we think of some past experiences of getting hurt (either physical or mental) which at that time we feel pain. In fact, the image of pain is imbued in the memory so recalling the memory is recalling the image. However, one must bear in mind that even one’s experience is the same as the character, one should not assume his pain is the same as that of the character. But one may say that he and the character have similar nature of sensation when they are going through the same event or situation as sensation is a causation effect in most cases. For instance, in a normal situation, the sensation that arises from being punched should be similar in nature when it is performed onto a person A or a B. This also sheds light on writers on how to provide a text that facilitates the reader’s understanding of the text. When aiming to describe the feeling of a character, a good writer is reminded to describe the situation where the character is in, rather than speak out the psychological state of the character (e.g. Tom is lonely or in pain) because those sensation and emotional words are not relating to any concrete objects and thus are too abstract to be psychologically felt by the readers. It is by no way that the writer is able to deliver the sensation/emotion of the characters to the readers by using sensation/emotion words alone, for example, saying “Peter is in pain” won’t direct us to understand what is the sensation of pain. Rather, if the situation where Peter feeling pain is described in greater detail, a reader can refer to a more similar experience as a reference for understanding. However, once again, as the sensation/emotion game depends on our form of life, the readers may not have similar images from his memory even going through the same situation of the character if the form of life between the writer and the readers vary differently. This also reminds the writer that a more commonly shared form of life should be adopted during writing.



IV. Understanding the Context of Poem
Lastly, I will discuss poetry which is the most difficult text to be understood. It portrays scenes with the metric format and poetic expression. The poetic expression doesn't accord to the rules of our ordinary language as it arranges irrelevant sentences together and uses incorrect collocation. Here, I am going to demonstrate how poetic expression looks like by quoting a poem named “I am an elephant you are a whale” (我是象你是鯨魚) by a Hong Kong poet Lui Wing Kai:

“For nourishing the dilapidated ceiling fan that no longer encloses coolness
Looking for security in a small shop nearby the sea and a pique
Like the elephant in the circus
Like the whale selling happiness in the aquarium
Use humming to trim myself
Trim the residual ocean in the days
Oxygen has to hide in a bottle forever
Before the exhaustion of the dimming light”

In this verse, it is difficult for us to understand how one uses humming to trim oneself and how an ocean can be trimmed. The use of “Trim” here obviously does not follow the rules of our ordinary language and it appears to be an incorrect collocation with the word “ocean”. Furthermore, there is no subject appearing in every sentence so we have no idea who is using the humming and who are trimming the ocean. The text becomes meaningless if we employ the usual rules of language games deployed in ordinary life. One may conclude that the poem doesn't follow our conventional rules in language so they provide no meaning to the readers and are senseless. However, it is self-evident that one grasps an idea or a concept after contemplating the poetic text. Hence, I argue that poems are not meaningless and, in fact, they follow rules that are the rules of the literary language games and such rules are built upon the rules of our ordinary language game.


Construction of Literary Language Game
Poems are also able to be understood through grammatical investigation, the literary language game deploys the pre-established concepts and assumptions embedded in the ordinary language games when it constructs its own rules. There are many rhetoric expressions in literary texts such as metaphor, metonymy and personification.

Rhetoric expressions
Metaphor aims to explain an object/event by comparison with another object/event that has similar characteristics. While for metonymy, it aims to explain an object/an event by referring to another object/event that has a similar concept. For personification, it aims to depict a non-living thing with characteristics of human beings. The metaphor, metonymy and personification are typical examples of using our pre-concept on objects and words. They require the readers firstly to understand the characteristics of the object being compared/referred with. That is to say, when we say “X is like Y”, we have to understand the characteristics of Y in order to understand what X is. It also requires us to judge what similar/different characteristics two objects are sharing between each other.(1) Only under this circumstance, the signified object/event can be a sign.

Taking the quoted poem as an example, regarding the sentence of “Like the elephant in the circus”, one needs to have the concepts and characteristics of “elephant” and “circus” in mind in order to understand the characteristics of “an elephant in a circus”. After that, one then has to figure out the prominent characteristics of "an elephant in a circus" and thus assigning those characteristics to the signified object that appeared in the poem. Such a process is very complicated and the outcome will be indefinite. It is because, firstly, some words don't refer to a physical object appearing on earth such as the sensation words. For sensation words, images/concepts embedded in the words vary greatly from person to person. Therefore, even two people have the same form of life, they may interpret the meaning of a literary text differently. This indeterminacy in fact is a characteristic of the literary language game and makes braid hermeneutic of the poem possible.

Besides, even though for the words that are referring to physical objects, a person may not grasp the characteristics of an object fully if he didn't meet the object before as the word itself provides no definition/description to the object being referred to.


Collocation
After understanding how rhetoric expression works, I am going to discuss how the collocation in poetic expression is understood basing on the rules our ordinary language game. In fact, this collocation, similar to the rhetoric expression, requires our understanding on how words are used and the concepts/images/objects implied/referred by the word. We then extract relevant information provided by these concepts/images/objects to interpret the “incorrect collocation” in order to understand the meaning of the sentence. A grammatical investigation can be used in this case.

For example, the meaning of “Trim the residual ocean in the days” is understood while by investigating the meaning of “trim”, “residual”, “ocean” and “day” grammatically. ”Trim” means removing the excess by cutting bit by bit and is applied to concrete objects. Since ocean and day are not something removable, we can take "days" as the meaning of "the past" and “sea” as the meaning of "huge" and "uncontrollable". By combining all these concepts, “ocean in the days” is interpreted as huge and uncontrolled memory. Therefore, the whole sentence means "removing the huge and uncontrolled memory that the monologist hopes to forget gradually". In this case, the “ocean” and “days” become symbols rather than the physical entities on earth.

Although we figure out the meaning of symbols used in a poem by grammatical investigation of the words, the investigation may not apply in every case as sometimes the words in a poem referring to some personal experiences of the poet. I have to clarify that poetic expression is not a private language. When readers understand how the words in the poems written by a poet functions symbolically, the poet and the readers will form a new kinds of language game which has its own rules. This also implies that in order to understand the literary texts written by a specific writer, one has to learn the language game created by the writer and master in it. For instance, the “dilapidated ceiling fan” has appeared in another book called “無風帶“ (Windless Area) which its background is set in an old-style Chinese restaurant. The restaurant is the place where the poet and his father used to spend time in so the restaurant bears an image of "habitat".

Nevertheless, some words in a poem are referring to another literary language game formed by another writer, which is called intertextuality. Throughout the literary development, the classical literary texts have produced many symbols which other writer adopts commonly in their own text without any explanation. For instance, “Werther” refers to a melancholy boy who falls in love. Werther is a character who killed himself due to his unfulfilled love in the book “The Sorrow of Young Werther” written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, if one does not have enough knowledge about literary works, he cannot understand what "Werther" is referring. Therefore, just like our ordinary language game, the literary language is a technique that requires our learning and mastering. (PI 199)

Unlike a novel or prose which there is always a beginning, a middle part and an end, the sentences in the poem are not linked to form a story nor there are causality linkages between sentences so one may find the poem as a scattering of words and thus claim that poem is meaningless. However, it is not the case, this kind of structure also provides meaning, only that it is not through understanding the causality of sentences but experiencing the combined images provided by each sentence. In fact, such structuring in the poem is the reason of itself being the highest form in all the literature form as it expresses the meaning of an intangible idea and concept that cannot be expressed by words alone, i.e. it expresses the inexpressible.

Expressing the Inexpressible
Through our previous discussion, we know that not all words are referring to physical objects in our world. Therefore, for those kinds of words, they are difficult to be understood for their abstractness. The learning of using these words is not through ostensive training but experiencing, for instance, an injury is enacted on a person in order to teach one how to use the word of “pain”. However, there are many words that cannot be taught by enacting a sensation or producing an experience artificially onto a person, for instance, the meaning of “freedom”, “love” or “meaningless” cannot be taught by enacting freedom, love, meaningless to a person. Instead, one learns the words of “freedom”, “love” and “meaningless” by experiencing freedom, love or meaningless in events. For example, we understand "freedom" when we discover that we have choices for us to choose. Therefore, the concepts of freedom, love and meaningless are inexpressible by words. Both prose and novel depict events to readers whose sensation and emotion are aroused from those scenarios.

A poem does more than arousing one’s emotion; it also lets the readers experience a new sensation, emotion, idea or concept that cannot be expressed by words in our daily language game. We may ask how this is possible? In a poem, each sentence provides an image of a specific scene, the images of all sentences are arranged in order artificially by the poet so the readers are like watching a movie with different images following one and another. This flashing of images will arouse our memories, feelings or sensations and a new feeling, sensation, emotion or idea will be formed when all images are all combined together. This new formation cannot be defined concretely in words of our daily language game as it is too complex to be expressed in daily language games.

However, there is no guarantee what will pop up in one’s mind while he is watching the flash of images so this new formation is different from person to person. There are many perspectives to interpret the poem and thus many new combinations may result. How the interpretation intrigues one’s own psychological and mental process is unexplainable and different among readers as they have their own past experiences, present conditions and future projection.

V. Conclusion
In this essay, I argued that using Wittgenstein’s framework of language will help to understand a literary text, rather than proving the meaninglessness of literary text. I first discuss how words are understood, including words of sensation and emotion, from their use and rule instead of relating to physical objects in most of the cases. Then, I argued that the literary text is not meaningless as it also follows a rule of literary language game. In fact, this kind of language is constructed upon our daily language game which also requires our mastering. Finally, I explained that the literary language game is essential in our life as it expresses the inexpressible concepts and ideas of the world.



(1) The elements of significant function are not by virtue of the compact force of their cores but by the network of oppositions that distinguish them and relate then to one another. - De Saussure, Course in General Linguistics


Reference
Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Philosophical Investigations”, Translated by G.E.M. Ansombe, Basil Blackwell, 1986 (Abbreviated as PI)

P. M. S. Hacker, “Wittgenstein: Meaning and Mind”, Basil Blackwell, 1990

Marie MCGinn, “The Routledge Guidebook to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations”, Routledge; 1 edition, 2013

呂永佳(Lui Wing Kai), “我是象你是鯨魚”, Infolink Publishing, 2017

呂永佳(Lui Wing Kai), “無風帶”, Infolink Publishing, 2006