may - wittgenstein reflection on lewis carroll looking glass

Language-Games and Nonsense: Wittgenstein's Reflection inCarroll's Looking-GlassLeila Silvana May

Philosophy and Literature, Volume 31, Number 1, April 2007, pp. 79-94(Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/phl.2007.0011

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/phl/summary/v031/31.1may.html

Leila S. May

WITTGENSTEINS REFLECTION IN LEWIS CARROLLS LOOKING-GLASS

According to one tradition in the theory of fiction, there is a kind of fantasy whose function is to invite the reader to acknowledge the possibility of a different reality.1 In this essay I want to ask whether Lewis Carrolls Alice books fit into this category; that is, I want to explore the possibility that Alices Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are not the pure nonsense that many readers take them to be. In considering the Alice books as fantasy offering a view of a different real-ity I do not deny that there are in these stories some mimetic elements alongside the fantasticrepresentations of things going on somewhere, somehow, in Victorian societyin which case the different reality presented will not be so terribly different as to be unrecognizable. For example, the Mad Tea Party in Alices Adventures in Wonderland is not only an act of fantasy but also an act of mimesis. It certainly imitates the real tea parties often held throughout Victorian Englandif caricature is a form of imitationbut it may also mime those mock tea parties held in English asylums whose goal was to model sane-like behavior to the inmates.2 An analogous question can be asked about Carrolls books in general: In addition to the component of fantasy, are they mimetic of Victorian culture itself, or merely of the Victorian conception of mad-ness? Michel Foucault has argued that, while the very idea of la folie is an historical construct, the dialectical relationship between reason and unreason, with each pole parasitic on the other, is a structural constant. Carrolls Alice books produce images that are discharged in the confused nineteenth-century landscape where these two opposites meet. In that respect, his books are not so different from many of the more standard novels written in mid-century England. In this essay I

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will explore features of this landscape, using a theoretical framework that has been synthesized from a number of related claims in the work of the linguistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. In addition to my long-range aim of urging further study of Wittgensteins work by literary critics, one of my specific goals is to show that the application of Wittgen-steinian methods to the works of Lewis Carroll reveals something about the hidden logic of Carrolls stories, and conversely that this procedure tests some of Wittgensteins intuitions concerning language. Yet another goal is to suggest that the structure of the discourse of domesticity as reflected in many mid-nineteenth-century novels is curiously similar to the structure of discourse in Wonderland and Looking-Glass Landthat the language-games played at these sites are at the same time functional and dysfunctional in much the same way. That may seem like a lot to attempt in a few pages, . . . but to paraphrase Humpty-Dumpty, when I ask words to do that much extra work, I pay them overtime.

In 1965 the philosopher George Pitcher published an essay, Wittgen-stein, Nonsense, and Lewis Carroll, in which he sought to demonstrate the remarkable extent and depth of affinity between these two great writers with respect to nonsense. In addition, he showed that the very same confusions with which Wittgenstein charged philosophers were deliberately employed by Carroll for comic effect, and that many of the examples that Wittgenstein used to illustrate his points resemble, in varying degrees, examples that are found in the works of Carroll.3 While I agree with Pitchers observation that the examples of nonsense that Wittgenstein offers are very similar to a primary strain of nonsense that runs through the Alice books, in the first section I intend to go beyond that observation and to apply some of Wittgensteins tools to Carrolls work and show that Wittgensteins work can be used to reveal features of literary narrative that might otherwise be obscured, and in the second section, to apply these tools to the works of fiction this side of the Looking-Glass.

I

Wittgenstein says that a language is a language-game. He also says that a language is a collection of many smaller language-games.4 In addi-tion, according to him, to speak of a language is to speak of a form of life (19). These distinct but related theses are more subtle and com-plicated than they appear to be, and they deserve (and have received) closer scrutiny than I will be able to give them here. I will use only

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enough space to summarize what I take to be their key insightsinsights that I will employ in my argument.

By designating a language as a language-gameor as a concatena-tion of language-gamesWittgenstein is calling attention to the rule-guided nature of linguistic activity. (All games are governed by rules, with the possible exceptions of the caucus race and the Queens croquet game in Wonderland.) Wittgenstein writes: The question, What is a word really? is analogous to What is a piece in chess? (108). Well, what is a piece in chess? Notice, when you explain to someone what the pawn is, you give her the rules governing the pawns moves in the game. (It can move two spaces on the first move; after that only one. It must move forward, except when it takes another piece, in which case it moves diagonally. If it reaches the other side of the board with-out being taken itself, it becomes a queen.) It is significant that I may make reference to the pawns probable size and shape, but I dont have to do so. (I recently saw a chess set in which the pawns were miniature Bart Simpsons.) If my chess set is missing a pawn, we can stipulate that a coin or a pen-top can serve the purpose. (Imagine! a pen-top that can be transformed into a Queen by a rule! This proves that rules produce worlds.) But to say that language is rule-governed is not to say that all language is governed by strict rules. Compare the rules of chess with the rules of ring-around-the-rosy. And even in games with very strict rules, not every feature of the game is rule guided.

For Wittgenstein, to be able to speak a language is to be able to play an ensemble of overlapping, crisscrossing, intersecting language-games, each of which is guided by different kinds of rules, producing different kinds of meaning. Conveniently for my thesis, Wittgenstein calls the relationships among these games family resemblances (67). What all of these language-games have in common is that if the governing rules are broken, nonsense happens. In that case, language functions like an engine running in neutral; you can gun the motor and make noise, but the gears do not engage. Wittgenstein says. You surely know what It is 5 oclock here means; so you also know what Its 5 oclock on the sun means (350). But a moments thought makes us realize that Its 5 oclock on the sun doesnt mean anything. (Alice, after listening to a discourse on time at the Mad Tea-Party: The Hatters remark seemed . . . to have no meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English.)5 Wittgenstein did not apply his investigation of sense and nonsense to literature or to cultural studies; rather, one of his goals was to demonstrate that much of traditional philosophy (including his own


earlier Tractatus Logico-philosophicus) was in fact composed of just such nonsense. But we know that Alices Adventures in Wonderland was one of his favorite books in Englishbeing a kind of catalogue of the sorts of things that go wrong in language, written by a professor of logic and mathematicshence there is good reason to apply his method to the study of some of his favorite literature.

A language is a form of life. This epigram stresses the social nature of linguistic activity, but more than that, it asserts that language-games do not simply represent social reality (though they do that); they also create it. Think of the performative act of the priest or the justice of peace who, in the appropriate [rule-guided] context, utters these words: I pronounce you husband and wife. Think of how the rules of baseball create a balk, and how those of football create unnecessary roughness or an ineligible receiver. Some rules, of course, govern pre-existing realities (for example, traffic rules), and some rules create new reali-ties, but both kinds of rules create new social facts.6 A language-game, then, is not simply a linguistic artifact; it is a set of rule-governed social practices that participate in the generation of a social world.

Now, a game whose rules are impossible to follow or can be broken at whim is an impossible gamea game that cannot be played. (Besides [said Alice], thats not a regular rule: you invented it just now. Its the oldest rule in the book, said the King [W, p. 156].) Similarly, a language whose rules cannot be followed or can be broken at whim is an impossible language. And, by conflating both of Wittgensteins epigrams (about language-games and forms of life) we can say that a language whose rules cannot be followed creates an impossible form of life. Or, we might say, it creates a form of madness. This brings us, of course, to the rabbit hole, or to the chimney mantle over which hangs the Looking-Glass.

When we fall down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, or step through the mirror into Looking-Glass Land, we can ask this question (as I frequently invite my students to do in my Victorian novel class): Are these lands possible worlds, or are they loony bins? That is, do rules exist there governing discourse and sociality that are possible rules, even if they are alien and incomprehensible to us, or are the rules there all self-defeating, producing no possible language-game, only a holiday from sanity? Later, I will say more about that question (my students who write on this topic seem to be divided on it), though I do want to say straight away that there is a strong prima facie case for the Cheshire Cats thesisthe Cheshire Cat, who not only asserts that Wonderland is

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a madhouse but provides a logical argument to prove it. This shows that, even if there is madness there, there is also a logic. Sometimes there is what we might call a hyper-logic. For example, when the White Queen in Looking-Glass Land wants to hire Alice as a ladys maid she offers her Two pence a week and jam every other day. She then proceeds to inform Alice that, in fact, the jam is never available. Its jam every other day: to-day isnt any other day, you know (LG, p. 247). Or, when the White King in Looking-Glass Land feels faint and is revived after chew-ing on some hay, certain logical niceties are observed in the extreme: The king munches away and says between bites, Theres nothing like eating hay when youre faint. When Alice observes that cold water or smelling salts might serve him better, the King replies, I didnt say there was nothing better . . . I said there was nothing like it (LG, p. 281). Or, finally, visit the Mad Tea-Party:

Take some more tea, the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly. Ive had nothing yet, Alice replied in an offended tone, so I cant

take more. You mean you cant take less, said the Hatter: itd be very easy to

take more than nothing. (W, p. 101)

There is definitely a form of logic (which I am calling hyper-logic because it is logic in excess) in these exchanges, despite the madnessor, perhaps we should say, because of the madness. Michel Foucault, paraphrasing the seventeenth-century physician, Paul Zacchias, writes: The marvelous logic of the mad which seems to mock that of the logi-cians because it resembles it so exactly, or rather because it is exactly the same. . . .7 Wonderland and Looking-Glass Land may be partially governed by a rule of hyper-logic requiring over-literalness, but such a rule would apparently conflict with another, demanding that the various meanings of polysemous words be interchangeable: I beg your pardon? said Alice. It isnt respectable to beg, said the King (LG, p. 280).

Another rule allows the conflation of opposite meanings, wherein contradiction is overwhelmed through obfuscation and presented as tautology, as in the case when Alice is asked to identify mustard as ani-mal, vegetable or mineral. Alice proudly points out that it is a vegetable, even if it doesnt look like one:

I quite agree with you, said the Duchess; and the moral of that isBe what you would seem to beor, if youd like it put more simplyNever imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others


that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise. (W, p. 122)

There is a host of other rules as well; for example:

Homophones are synonyms.8

Homonyms are synonyms.9

Antonyms are synonyms.10

Category mistakes are not mistakes.11

Any word can be arbitrarily re-defined at whim.12

A speaker can impose meaning on nonsensical sounds if doing so is convenient to himself.13

I began by posing a question concerning the logical or social possibil-ity of such worlds as those humorously depicted in Carrolls books. The baffling rules of the cacophonous swarm of language-games played in Wonderland and Looking-Glass Land seem incapable of generating a recognizable form of life, at least at first glance. Would it do any good to induct Wittgenstein into service in an attempt to resolve this ques-tion? On his account, can we lay these sets of rules side by side and demonstrate their internal inconsistency and incompatibility with one another, and deduce a priori that no such worlds are possible? Isnt Witt-genstein bound to declare that here language has gone on permanent, irrevocable holiday, and that the Cheshire Cat is indeed correct in his declaration, were all mad here (W, p. 89)?

Not necessarily. There are passages in Philosophical Investigations that are conducive to the view that Wonderland is not a site of insanity but a possible world that would merely be (radically) different from our own. In 185, Wittgenstein imagines a culture whose citizens read a fingerpost such as the one below as pointing to the left rather than to the right:

FThis society would be a form of life in which a person naturally

reacted to the gesture of pointing with the hand by looking in the direction of the line from finger-tip to wrist, not from wrist to finger-tip (185). Wittgenstein says that this episode would be similar to the case of a person who might be told to start counting with 0, adding 2 each time: 0 2 4 6 8 10, which the individual does, but when he gets to 1000, instead of writing 1000 1002 1004 1006, he writes 1000 1004 1008 1012 (185). We observers think the individual

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has failed to understand the rule, but Wittgenstein seems sympathetic to the possibility that we are dealing with an individual who simply under-stands the rule differently. Perhaps it comes naturally to this person to understand our order with our explanation as we should understand the order: Add 2 up to 1000, 4 up to 2000, 6 up to 3000 and so on (185). Can we imagine a culture in which this persons apparently very odd method of adding would be the natural one? Wittgenstein apparently thinks we can. Must we say about the people of the culture, They are wrong! and They misunderstand the rule? Wittgenstein is hesitant to do so. At this point, for us, things are getting curiouser and curiouser. We may indeed think that we have fallen down the rabbit hole. Wittgen-stein had said that when rules are broken, nonsense happens: language goes on holiday (38). But here, he seems to be suggesting, the rules have not been broken; rather, they have been understood differently by players from somewhat different language-games.

If we confronted a girl who read the fingerpost as pointing backward, or a boy who counted in the fashion Wittgenstein imagined above, we would think we had encountered two very odd little ducks (or Dodos). Philosopher Barry Stroud, commenting on the passages we have just read, says of individuals who behave as do our boy and girl, they would be different sorts of beings from us, beings which we could not understand and with which we could not enter into meaningful communication. They would be unfathomable to us.14 This may be Strouds elliptical way of agreeing with the Cheshire Cat, saying that if the creatures of a Wonderland or a Looking-Glass Land did exist, they would be mad. Or he may mean that such creatures would simply be engaged in forms of life so radically different from our own as to be unintelligible to us. But in either case, we can never communicate with them, so the two interpretations are identical in terms of their consequences for us.

Or maybe, to the contrary, with an effort we can communicate with them. Critic Henry Staten, referring to a number of commentators who follow Strouds lead, says:

But these writers fail to distinguish the different levels on which our forms of life are constituted, and take insufficient account of the looseness of the tie between culturally constituted practices and their natural sub-stratum . . . . Wittgensteins point is not that we cant [understand these eccentric uses of rules] because the deviants behavior is unnatural or intrinsically unintelligible, but rather that we cant because our minds are closed to some other way of doing it as a consequence of our being so utterly under the spell of our usual ways.15


It is true that there is some evidence that Alice herself begins to under-stand the strange rules governing the language-games she encounters. For instance, there is an interesting moment when that great semanticist, Humpty Dumpty, is explaining to Alice the meaning of the now-famous poem, Jabberwocky:

Twas brillig, and the slithy tovesDid gyre and gimble in the wabe:All mimsy were the borogroves, And the mome raths outgrabe.

Alice asks:

And whats to gyre and to gimble?To gyre is to go round and round like a gyroscope. To gimble is to

make holes like a gimlet.And the wabe is the grass plot around a sun-dial, I suppose? said

Alice, surprised at her own ingenuity.Of course it is. Its called wabe you know, because it goes a long way

before it, and a long way behind itAnd a long way beyond it on each side, Alice added. (LG, p. 272)

Wittgenstein says that the way we can tell that someone has under-stood a rule is if she says, Now I know how to go on16 (179). Alice knows how to go on. She is beginning to understand the language-game Humpty-Dumpty is playing. We might respond that Carroll has arbitrarily said that Alice understands, when in fact, she cant have done so, but I dont think thats correct. My students and I have experimented with Jabberwocky. We have imagined a society in which the first stanza of the poem is taught to all children early on under circumstances resembling those of religious or moral training. The children memorize the poem, and every time they say or hear the word tove, they learn to criss-cross their arms over their chest, closed fists against the shoulders. Then they are quizzed about the poem with cathecismal-type questions, such as: What was it like when the slithy toves (criss-cross) did gyre and gimble? Answer: It was brillig. There is a set of at least fourteen such creedal queries with which the initiate may be examined, and for which there are correct answers. My students and I have acted this catechism out. It is both humorous and oddly mesmerizing, and, because the militantly patriotic or religious ritual of crossing ones arms with clenched fists

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begins to feel natural, it is also slightly foreboding. Some students have said that after a few minutes, they did not doubt that slithy toves exist. (Why else would we be told so often and under such sacrosanct conditions that they gyre and gimble in the wabe?) One student joked (I hope!) that he would be prepared to sacrifice his life to protect the toves. We could imagine soldiers going to war wearing belt buckles engraved with the words, The toves are with us, perhaps fighting against soldiers whose buckles displayed Die Toven mit uns. This is a little scary. I have the feeling that Wittgenstein did not see that nonsense too can be orderly (rule-guided), and can (be made to) serve a func-tion. Wittgenstein says that the meaning is the use (For a large class of casesthough not for allin which we employ the word meaning it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language [43])but it is becoming clearer and clearer that nonsense can also have a use. I will return to this point later when we discuss Victorian literature other than the Alice books.

I think that, up to this point, the result of my Wittgensteinian study of the language-games played in Wonderland and Looking-Glass Land is that we must defer judgment regarding the logical possibility of these liminal spaces being possible worlds, but that we must remain open to that possibility. If we do conclude that Wonderland and Looking-Glass Land are after all possible forms of life, are we as outsiders precluded from criticizing them, according to Wittgenstein? (Perhaps my real agenda is to ask: If we were to conclude that novels contemporary with the Alice books depict actual forms of Victorian life, would social criti-cism thereby be precluded, according to Wittgenstein?) Apparently the answer to this question depends on the resolution of yet another debate among philosophers over an interpretation of a cluster of Wittgensteins ideas. The debate concerns the analytical status of language-games and forms of life. Are these categories ultimately ontologically and epis-temologically foundational, as a number of Wittgensteins interpreters claim? That is, once a speech act has been firmly identified as belonging to a specific language-game or form of life, can philosophical analysis go no further? There is evidence that Wittgenstein believed they are indeed foundational, as in these passages below:

Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; in the end it can only describe it. For it cannot give it any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is. (124)


If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: This is simply what I do. (217)

Our mistake is to look for an explanation where we ought to look at what happens as a proto-phenomenon [Urphnomene]. That is, where we ought to have said: This language-game is played. (654)

These passages have been construed (for example, by Ernest Geller) as indicating that for Wittgenstein the concatenations of language-games that constitute forms of life are in some sense ultimate and non-negotiable.17 But this interpretation fails to take into consideration Wittgensteins view that language-games and the rules within them evolve over time (new types of language, new language games . . . come into existence, and others become obsolete and forgotten [83]), and can be disrupted by social intervention. As Wittgenstein was planning to go to the Soviet Union to work as a laborer, his biographer quotes him as saying, I am a communist, at heart.18 Communistseven those who are simply communists at heartare not known to withhold social criticism. The correct position in this debate may be that, for Wittgenstein (as for Bertrand Russell), social criticism may indeed be expressed by philosophers, but their social criticism should not be con-fused with their philosophy. If, on the other hand, I were to conclude that Wittgenstein did believe that both philosophy and social criticism are obliged to leave everything as it is once the language-games and forms of life of a community have been laid bare, I would respectfully demur. Furthermore, such a conclusion would not lead me to follow Gellners wholesale rejection of Wittgensteins work on language-games and forms of life. These categories are not the end of analysis but are themselves useful analytic tools.

II

In the second section of this essay I would like to historicize Wittgen-steins idea of language-games by saying something about the application of this idea to Victorian domestic fiction other than the Alice books in terms of Wittgensteins categories. In doing so, I am carving out a large portion of the mid-Victorian socio-linguistic terrain, but not all of it. I believe that a similar kind of analysis with similar kinds of results could be performed on the nineteenth-century language-games of, for example, class interaction (e.g., the language-games of condescension),

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of courtship, of fashion, of servitude, of social exclusion, of gossip, of concealment and evasion, of poverty, of property, of empire, and of ful-fillment of religious duty, among others. I maintain, with Wittgenstein, that these games would all exhibit family resemblances, and would also resemble in some ways the more outrageous language-games played in Wonderland and Looking-Glass Land.

It may seem perverse to call Carrolls texts a contribution to domes-tic fiction, because they are merely stories of a little girls dreams. But the Alice books are tales of two sisters and the adventures of one of them when she wanders beyond the confines of the nursery. The first of these stories was originally told to two sisters on a family outing by their tutor. On one occasion there is even a story within a story about the trials and tribulations of sisters.19 Still, some might prefer to classify the Alice books as domestic fiction manqu; there is no central family in either Wonderland or Looking-Glass Land, and the family relations we do seee.g., between the White King and Queen, between the Duchess and her baby, and between the brothers Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum) are all, at best, vexed relations. But this is very much to the point. It is striking how many examples of Victorian fiction there are, both inside and outside the canon, whose central and peripheral families are failed families. Either parents are early removed from the scene by death or madness, leaving children to fend for themselves, or families prove to be dysfunctional under the pressure of social forces.20 Yet, these stories are told within the context of the ideology of domesticity that dominated the mid-Victorian period, an ideology that prioritized family values over all others, and built the justification for Crown and Empire upon them.

What kind of language-games must be played to guarantee family resemblances in these circumstances? First, because of the hothouse environment of the mid-Victorian nursery,21 and the dread of incest (in the Kierkegaardian sensei.e., a sympathetic antipathy and an anti-pathetic sympathya desire for what one fears and a fear of what one desires) in the culture at large,22 we will find language-games that sustain a sexless model of sexual relations, a sexual model for sexless relations, a denial of the possibility of incestuous desire, a fascination with it and a deep anxiety over itthese curious contradictions that sustain the social world presupposed in the literature of the day are simultaneously exposed and rationalized by a number of ingenious language-games that Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, Collins, the Bront sisters, and countless other authors relay and, to an extent, help create. These language-games are


like the myths that Lvi-Strauss studies in his structuralist analysis of primitive cultural discourse. Like those myths, they attempt to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction, and like them, they fail in this effort, for achieving such a goal is impossible, says Lvi-Strauss, if, as it happens, the contradiction is real.23

Still, there are strategies to avoid the inevitable, and no one was per-haps better able than Dickens to take advantage of languages capacity for metaphorization to solidify a new familial grammar. He and a small army of scriveners worked assiduously both to sexualize blood relation-ships (little Florence Dombey cries out: Oh! Dear nurse! . . . let me lie by my brother! . . . Oh! I think he loves me, . . . Let me lie by him. Pray do! . . . Oh, pray, pray, let me lie by my brother tonight, for I believe he is fond of me!),24 and at the same time to legitimize the artifice of extending brotherhood and sisterhood to outsiders in order to induce them to take on new familial obligations, and to extend the small family circle beyond its suffocating tight confines. (After her little brothers death, Florence says to Walter Gay, her future husband, If youll be a brother to me, Walter, now that [Paul] is gone and I have none on earth, Ill be your sister all my life, and think of you like one wherever we may be! [p. 337].)

A novel such as Harriet Martineaus Deerbrook produces a series of language-games that affirm and negate the same propositions. It is both affirmed and denied that familial sameness bonds individuals in love, that blood is thicker than water, that families are good, and that speech acts extending sibling bonds to outsiders produce beneficial results. We saw in Alice that blatant contradiction is overwhelmed through obfusca-tion and not recognized as aporia but is casually presented as definition. (Well, then, the Cat went on, you see a dog growls when its angry, and wags its tail when its pleased. Now I growl when Im pleased and wag my tail when Im angry. Therefore Im mad. I call it purring, not growling, said Alice. Call it what you like, said the Cat. Do you play croquet . . . ? [W, p. 89].) But we see versions of the same language-games in other novels of the period shortly before Alice tumbled down the rabbit hole. In The Half-Sisters, for example, whenever Geraldine Jewsburys characters engage in the language-game whose rules allow the drafting of outsiders into the family circle by virtue of performative utterances so designating them as family members, these rules serve both to de-eroticize familial bonds and to efface boundaries between familial and extra-familial social relations. The language-game that con-

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flates social roles in Jewsbury and elsewhere functions ideologically to strengthen social bonds and class identities by transforming them into simulacra of foundational structures of society itself (namely, versions of blood connections) while at the same time undermining those very bonds by annulling the frontiers among the various stations within the family, hence confusing the order of the hierarchy of social power itself. This process of subversion is also carried out insofar as the attempt to de-eroticize sibling bondsbased as it is on a certain form of sexual ignorance that the nineteenth century had chosen for itselfends with mixed results. In The Half-Sisters, one sister dies of shame and despair, the other moves from the position of foreign bastard actress (it is not made clear which of these three categories is worst) to viscountess, new matriarch of an ancient noble family. But one of the novels char-actersthe Viscounts sister, who, of course, does not approve of her brothers choiceputs an end to the language-game that has been played throughout the narrative with a line not often seen in Victorian novels: nobody believes in brotherly love these days.25 This has a deflation-ary effect similar to the one provoked by a finally fed-up Alice when, at the trial of the Knave of Hearts, she announces to the jury and to the King and Queen of Hearts: Stuff and nonsense! . . . Youre nothing but a pack of cards! (W, p. 161). Wittgenstein says that, in most cases, language-games are not playful activities but kinds of labor; they get jobs done (43). He points out that neither fun, amusement, nor enjoyment can be part of the definition of the concept game or play. Even if all players in a dreary game of Monopoly are miserable, they are still playing the game of Monopoly (66).

A common denominator of much of this periods literature is the figurative power of the language-games of family ties to link non-family members, strategically absorbing them into a network of familial union. In these novels, and no doubt in the society they represent and help to produce, such metaphorical and metonymical extensions serve a number of important functions. Figurative familial extension inducts outsiders who may be useful in social, political, economic or reproductive ways into the service of individual families, or into the service of the idea of the family; it disguises sexual strategies and protects them from blatant discovery until their successful consummation, and defuses the volatility of sexuality in general. By domesticating desire, these extensions allow for a level of intimacy and self-revelation in a society whose organization of classes and social roles problematizes intimate personal contact; they


reassign social responsibilities and alignments; they give the illusion of naturalness to otherwise highly artificial forms of interaction; they soften social rigidity and allow for social mobility; they erode boundaries between roles and hierarchical structures of power and authority. These extensions intensify, thicken and condense relations, reducing them to relations of blood while at the same time diluting and trivializing real family relations; they sexualize family relationships and encourage incestuous liaisons. They familiarize psychology (leading perhaps to Freuds hyper-familialization of pathology wherein all other pathologies are derived from the primitive dysfunctional family); they Christianize the secular, with constant allusions to the first (dysfunctional) family: Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel, and the second (perfect but impossible) family: Joseph, Mary and Jesus. They moralize the ethically neutral and neutralize the moral: in a social world where the (rather recently arrived) nuclear family emerges as the highest ethical and aesthetic value, morally neutral non-familial phenomena and personages become moralized, and what cannot be assimilated by the familial discourse becomes marginalized.

However, the general effect of this ever-expanding system of metaphor-izing the family and neutralizing to the point of oblivion anything that resists incorporation is ultimately anarchic. The distinctions on which the family is based become blurred and erased, social roles serving initially as ideal models are nullified, and the original familial concept emptied of meaning. (If everyone is a family member, no one is a family member.) We are returned to a kind of primordial soup. This syntactical Babel proves, then, to be one of several self-defeating features of the mid-Victorian domestic project, though even these defeats were absorbed into the language-games of the day as part of the form of life.26

I end by asking a question about the Victorian world that I asked about Wonderland and Looking-Glass Land: Is this a possible world? Is this a sustainable form of life? Well, philosophers tell us that if something is actual, it is possible, and there was an actual mid-Victorian world. The rules of the language-games I have identified were learned, deployed, and passed on to great numbers of middle-class English citizens and in the novels they wrote and read for about forty years. Wittgenstein says that the meaning is the use. These language-games had their uses. But use too evolves; rules within games change, and old games are displaced by new. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century domesticity had lost its word-magic.27 It was replaced by other language-gamesby new mythswith family resemblances to the old ones. I am referring, of

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course, to the new forms of language based on the writings of Misters Darwin, Spenser, Agassiz, Tuke, Pinel, Ellis and Freud, among others.

North Carolina State University, Raleigh

I am indebted to Donald Palmer for lengthy conversations about Wittgenstein, and for his invalu-able comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this essay.

1. Kathryn Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature (New York: Methuen, 1984), p. xiv.

2. Michel Foucault describes such tea parties hosted by the early nineteenth-century mad doctor Samuel Tuke in Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason [1961], trans. Richard Howard (New York: Random House, 1973), p. 249.

3. George Pitcher, Wittgenstein, Nonsense, and Lewis Carroll, The Massachusetts Review VI (1965): 591611. Passages cited here are from a reprint of Pitchers essay in Stanford Patrick Rosenbaum, ed., English Literature and British Philosophy: A Collection of Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 22950.

4. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations [posthumous 1953], trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1964), 7. Subsequent references will be to Part I, completed in 1945. Section numbers will be cited in the text, as above.

5. Lewis Carroll, The Annotated Alice: Alices Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass [1865 & 1871], Introduction and notes by Martin Gardner (New York: Bramhall House, 1960), p. 97; hereafter abbreviated W and LG, respectively.

6. This topic is treated extensively by John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995).

7. Madness and Civilization, p. 95.

8. We called him Tortoise because he taught us (W, p. 127).

9. In case of danger, a tree could bark . . . It says Boughwough! . . . Thats why its branches are called boughs! (LG, p. 202).

10. Alice says: a hill cant be a valley, you know. That would be nonsense The Red Queen shook her head (LG, p. 207).

11. I see nobody on the road, said Alice. I only wish I had such eyes, the King remarked in a fretful tone. To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why, its as much as I can do to see real people, by this light! (LG, p. 279).

12. When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, it means just what I choose it to meanneither more nor less. The question is, said Alice, whether you can make a word mean so many different things. The question is, said Humpty Dumpty, which is to be masterthats all (LG, p. 269).


13. Well, toves are something like, badgerstheyre something like lizardsand theyre something like corkscrews, said Humpty Dumpty (LG, p. 271).

14. Barry Stroud, Wittgenstein and Logical Necessity, Wittgenstein: The Philosophical Investigations, ed. George Pitcher (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday/Anchor, 1966), p. 492. Originally published in Philosophical Review 74 (1965): 50418.

15. Henry Staten, Wittgenstein and Derrida (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), pp. 100101.

16. In fact, Wittgenstein uses the phrase seven times between 17983.

17. Ernest Gellner, Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Hapsburg Dilemma (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1999), p. 105.

18. Ray Monk, Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Penguin, 1990), p. 343.

19. At the Mad Tea-Party: Once upon a time there were three little sisters, the Dor-mouse began in a great hurry: and their names were Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie; and they lived at the bottom of a well (W, p. 100). Martin Gardner comments on this passage: The three little sisters are the three Liddell sisters. Elsie is L. C. (Lorina Charlotte), Tillie refers to Ediths family nickname Matilda, and Lacie is an anagram of Alice (W, p. 100).

20. The examples are legion. One has only to look at virtually any novel by authors as disparate as Dickens and the Bronts to have this confirmed.

21. Nancy Anderson, for example, has characterized the Victorian family as a hot-house of repressed incestuous feeling (The Marriage With a Deceased Wifes Sister bill Controversy: Incest Anxiety and the Defense of Family Purity in Victorian England, Journal of British Studies 21 [1982]: 7). Foucault, in The History of Sexuality, describes it as a hotbed of sexual excitement (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley [New York: Vintage Books, 1980], p. 109).

22. Sren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread (1844), trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 38.

23. Claude Lvi-Strauss, The Structural Study of Myth, in Structural Anthropology, vol. 2, trans. Monique Lytton (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1978), p. 229.

24. Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son [1848] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 106.

25. Geraldine Endsor Jewsbury, The Half Sisters [1848] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 236.

26. I have also made this argument in my Disorderly Sisters: Sibling Relations and Sororal Resistance in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2001), pp. 2023.

27. Anita Levy deals with this topic, saying that in the second half of the nineteenth century the Victorians lost faith in domestication as the solution for virtually every social problem . . . they no longer believed in the power of domestication to seat every mother by a happy household fire, to control colonized populations, and to calm lunatics (Other Women: The Writing of Class, Race, and Gender, 18321898 [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991], p. 107).

may - wittgenstein reflection on lewis carroll looking glass

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