The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary by Marjorie Perloff
Rebecca Saunders

Perloff, Marjorie. Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary. Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996. 285 pp. $27.95.

If books could be cataloged by season, Wittgenstein’s Ladder would be a summer: clear, temperate, disencumbered of hibernal rigors, undisturbed by stormy skies. The book explores what Marjorie Perloff terms a “Wittgen-steinian poetics” both in works that bear a structural resemblance to Wittgenstein’s thought and in texts that explicitly invoke him as an influence. On the one hand, the book offers a lucid introduction to the life and thought of Viennese philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as intriguing readings of Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, and a series of less canonical writers. On the other hand, it skips over theoretical problems with a frustrating insouciance.

Marjorie Perloff takes her title from the final page of the Tractatus: “My propositions are elucidatory in this way,” writes Wittgenstein: “he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)” With the boost of this metaphor, Perloff identifies a Wittgensteinian poetics that is characterized by its use of everyday language, its suspicion of generalizations and totalizing theories and its insistence that one cannot “climb the same ladder twice.” Perloff’s first two chapters are dedicated to analyses of Wittgenstein’s texts. She convincingly argues that the Tractatus is less a logical treatise than an avant-garde poetics of irresolution and a testimony to the inexpressibility of Wittgenstein’s World War I experience. Her discussion of the Philosophical Investigations focuses on the famous concept of “language-games,” which she interprets as prefiguring “post-structural” rejections of an inherent or natural meaning in language.

Subsequently, Perloff argues for a Wittgensteinian poetics in Stein’s experimental uses and abuses of ordinary language and in the “context disorder” of Beckett’s Watt. In her most interesting chapter she interprets Beckett’s resistance to language within the context of the French Resistance: Beckett’s “day job” during the years he was writing Watt, was encoding, delivering, and decoding messages for the Resistance. Perloff also investigates experiments with Wittgenstein’s thought by Austrian novelists Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard, by poets Robert Creeley, Ron Silliman, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Lyn Hejinian, and by conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth.

While Wittgenstein’s Ladder sidesteps theorizing the notion of “analogy” on which it largely relies and occasionally achieves accessibility at the price of precision, it is nonetheless filled with rich textual insights set in illuminating contextual surroundings. [Rebecca Saunders]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary by Marjorie Perloff Rebecca Saunders Perloff, Marjorie. Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary. Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996. 285 pp. $27.95. If books could be cataloged by season, Wittgenstein’s Ladder would be a summer: clear, temperate, disencumbered of hibernal rigors, undisturbed by stormy skies. The book explores what Marjorie Perloff terms a “Wittgen-steinian poetics” both in works that bear a structural resemblance to Wittgenstein’s thought and in texts that explicitly invoke him as an influence. On the one hand, the book offers a lucid introduction to the life and thought of Viennese philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as intriguing readings of Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, and a series of less canonical writers. On the other hand, it skips over theoretical problems with a frustrating insouciance. Marjorie Perloff takes her title from the final page of the Tractatus: “My propositions are elucidatory in this way,” writes Wittgenstein: “he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)” With the boost of this metaphor, Perloff identifies a Wittgensteinian poetics that is characterized by its use of everyday language, its suspicion of generalizations and totalizing theories and its insistence that one cannot “climb the same ladder twice.” Perloff’s first two chapters are dedicated to analyses of Wittgenstein’s texts. She convincingly argues that the Tractatus is less a logical treatise than an avant-garde poetics of irresolution and a testimony to the inexpressibility of Wittgenstein’s World War I experience. Her discussion of the Philosophical Investigations focuses on the famous concept of “language-games,” which she interprets as prefiguring “post-structural” rejections of an inherent or natural meaning in language. Subsequently, Perloff argues for a Wittgensteinian poetics in Stein’s experimental uses and abuses of ordinary language and in the “context disorder” of Beckett’s Watt. In her most interesting chapter she interprets Beckett’s resistance to language within the context of the French Resistance: Beckett’s “day job” during the years he was writing Watt, was encoding, delivering, and decoding messages for the Resistance. Perloff also investigates experiments with Wittgenstein’s thought by Austrian novelists Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard, by poets Robert Creeley, Ron Silliman, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Lyn Hejinian, and by conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth. While Wittgenstein’s Ladder sidesteps theorizing the notion of “analogy” on which it largely relies and occasionally achieves accessibility at the price of precision, it is nonetheless filled with rich textual insights set in illuminating contextual surroundings. [Rebecca Saunders]

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