WITTGENSTEIN'S LANGUAGE GAME

Wittgenstein's Language Game

Wittgenstein's Language Game

Introduction

This essay uses the late work of Ludwig Wittgenstein to reformulate the traditional distinction between story and narrative discourse, or diegetic and extra-diegetic levels of narrative, as a distinction between story and narrative act. In describing the transformations performed by the narrative act, the author elaborates the principle of narrative uncertainty, which dictates that the more definite the account of story or plot, the more indefinite the account of the narrative act -- and vice versa. In this conceptual framework, the essay then characterizes the narrative act as the differential, within a given fictional text, of two of more types of stories (or plots), and articulates the relationship between narrative act, narrator, and cultural context.

Analysis

Traditionally, the theory of narrative fiction has been directed mainly to the level of the action of the story and its meaning.[1-2] Yet, as more recent narrative theorists have pointed out, it is the narrative presentation of the story which any reader first encounters; the story as a separable part of that presentation is an abstraction constructed after the act. This is not to say that storytellers do not inherit pre-existing cultural materials and indeed narratives out of which they construct their own tales; all tales, as Hawthorne said, are "twice-told," all tellings ultimately retellings. Rather, it is to say that our only access to "the tale itself" is through the act of its being told (or retold); by that act, the story is inevitably rearranged, deformed, and made into a new version that possesses its own singularity -- and which may then be retold again.

What this means for interpretation is that the primary object of interpetation is the narrative act of telling the story "the story," as Henry James put it, "of the story" -- and that for purposes of criticism, it matters not at all, logically speaking, what the "content" of that story is. For, clearly, failing to tell a story, in the sense of making its events radically ambiguous in meaning and content, is quite as much a narrative act as succeeding in doing so. Moreover, the "failures" in this respect of Henry James, Marcel Proust, and many other modern writers, are instructive. They point up the existence of a principle of narrative uncertainty partly analogous to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in physics.

The latter states that the precision of our measurement of a particle's momentum is inversely proportional to the precision of our measurement of that particle's position. The reason for this is that the measurement of a particle's momentum interferes with and alters the position of that particle -- and vice versa. Any tool developed to increase the precision of one value will simultaneously decrease the precision of the other. Two common misconceptions about Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle should be avoided. First, it does not state that "everything is uncertain." On the contrary, it describes an uncertainty that is in fact generated by certainty; inaccuracy about one ...