A Different Order of Difficulty: Literature after Wittgenstein by Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Different Order of Difficulty: Literature after Wittgenstein by Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé Michael McGillen A Different Order of Difficulty: Literature after Wittgenstein. By Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Pp. 342. Paper $32.50. ISBN 978-0226677156. Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé's thought-provoking A Different Order of Difficulty: Literature after Wittgenstein joins a burgeoning body of scholarship on Ludwig Wittgenstein's relationship to modernism. A study at the boundary of literary studies and philosophy, it explores both the literary qualities of Wittgenstein's philosophy and the philosophical implications of modernist literature. With chapters on Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and J.M. Coetzee, the book offers a comparative analysis of Wittgenstein and these figures based on the affinities of their aesthetic approaches and ethical outlooks—and not a study of influence. What Wittgenstein shares with modernist literature, as Zumhagen-Yekplé demonstrates in a series of incisive readings, is an interest in riddles, puzzles, and parables. The book shows that modernism constructs puzzles that entail a different order of difficulty: they are solved not by finding an answer, but by engaging with problems and perplexities that admit no easy solutions. It is here that we discover a yearning for self-transformation—and for spiritual redemption—that Zumhagen-Yekplé defines as the locus of the ethical. Our encounter with the difficulties of parables and puzzles is ethical because it requires that we engage imaginatively with the limits of our everyday experience. Zumhagen-Yekplé's reading of Wittgenstein follows in the footsteps of Cora Diamond and James Conant, who advocate for a "resolute" account of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). In its penultimate proposition, Wittgenstein indicates that the true aim of the book's exploration of logic and language was to prompt the reader to recognize the senselessness of these propositions and thereby engage in ethical self-reflection about what it means to live rightly. He likens the metaphysical propositions of the Tractatus to a ladder that, once it has been ascended, can be jettisoned. For "resolute" readers of Wittgenstein, the senselessness of the book's metaphysical propositions is categorical and allows for no distinction between meaningful and meaningless nonsense. Accordingly, "resolute" readers distinguish between the "frame" of the Tractatus (its ethical aim) and its "body" (its logical propositions): on its surface, the Tractatus is a book about philosophical logic, but if one penetrates the surface, one discovers a deeper ethical aim that follows from the recognition of the senselessness of metaphysics. As readers of Wittgenstein, we may rightfully ask ourselves: to what end should we contend with the book's logical propositions if, in the end, they are to be discarded as nonsense? Yet this perplexity, Zumhagen-Yekplé argues, is central to Wittgenstein's method, whose insights lie in the process of thought itself rather than in its results. Indeed, A Different Order of Difficulty proves most compelling when it shows that the "tactical" use of difficulty (in George Steiner's terms) gives way to an "ontological" [End Page 414] difficulty—one that can never be resolved because it is implicit in the conditions of our existence. With reference to Wittgenstein's Lectures on Ethics, the book notes that it is possible to use nonsense creatively and to engage with nonsense through the imagination. This link between ethical self-transformation and the imagination places Wittgenstein in close proximity to modernist literature, whose fundamental concern, Zumhagen-Yekplé suggests, is to probe the limits of human possibility. Comparing the Tractatus with Kafka's "On Parables" (1931), she shows how each is concerned with bridging a gap: between the world of facts and ethical experience (Wittgenstein) and between everyday life and literature (Kafka). Both Kafka and Wittgenstein present their readers with parables that do not communicate a lesson didactically, but rather subtly prompt their readers to change their way of seeing the world. In a chapter on Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927), by contrast, Zumhagen- Yekplé shows how modernism confronts not only interpretative difficulties but also what Diamond calls the "difficulty of reality" in experiences of suffering, trauma, and death. These difficulties punctuate Woolf's novel, most palpably in the truncated experiences of loss in "Time Passes," and...