Meaning & Interpretation Meaning & Interpretation Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary Knowledge G. L. HAGBERG Cornell University Press Ithaca and London Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/ Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. Copyright © 1994 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850, or visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 1994 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hagberg, Garry, 1952– Meaning and interpretation : Wittgenstein, Henry James, and literary knowledge / G.L. Hagberg. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-2926-2 (cloth) — ISBN-13: 978-1-5017-2696-5 (pbk.) 1. James, Henry, 1843–1916—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Fiction— History and criticism—Theory, etc. 3. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889–1951. 4. Knowledge, Theory of, in literature. 5. Meaning (Philosophy) in literature. I. Title. 2124.H34 1994 121'.68'092—dc20 93-36146 The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ To the memory of my father ! J -� Contents Acknowledg;ments IX Introduction I Language-Games and Artistic Styles 9 The Concept of a Language-Game rn Linguistic and Artistic Microcosms I 7 Style, Coherence, and Artistic Limits 24 2 Forms of Life and Artistic Practices 45 The Concept of a Form of Life 46 Gesture, Ritual, and Artistic "Spirit" 59 Meaning and Artistic Uses 69 3 Circumstances of Significance 84 "The Author of Beltraffio" 84 Descriptions In Situ 89 Tone and Gestural Expression 95 v111 Contents 4 Aspects of Interpretation "The Lesson of the Master" r o5 Against Reductionism 129 "The Figure in the Carpet" r 39 5 Interpretation and Philosophical Method 149 "The Tree of Knowledge" r 5 r Epistemological Fiction r 5 7 Literary Interpretation and Philosophical Investigation r 69 Index � Acknowledgments I initially drafted much of what follows at Cambridge Univer­ sity, where I presented parts of the work in progress to various seminars and meetings. I thank everyone with whom I dis­ cussed this project as it developed, especially John MacKinnon, Hugh Mellor, Alex Neill, Robert Stern, and George Watson. I also thank Colin Lyas and Michael Tanner, whose detailed commentary on an earlier draft sharpened the focus of the entire project. Most of all, I thank Renford Bambrough, who allowed me to present sections of this book to his seminars and read and commented extensively on each part as it developed as well as on the entire manuscript. I cannot overstate the philosophical benefitI derived fromthose many meetings and conversations, and the careful readerwill see throughout the extent to which my work refers to his. I also thank a great many people and institutions on this side of the Atlantic, including, at the Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg, William Mahar, head of the Humanities Divi­ sion, and Howard Sachs, dean forResear ch and Graduate Stud­ ies (both of whom put many resources at my disposal); the Research Initiation Grant Program and the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies, both of which supported the work with fellowships; and a few individuals who stand out from a x Acknowledgments larger, very supportive crowd: Donald Wolff, Troy Thomas, and, most particularly, Louise Hoffman. I presented sections of the work in progress to meetings of the American Society for Aesthetics and to the International Association for Philos­ ophy and Literature, and I am also grateful for the support and fully comprehending commentary of Laurent Stern, Lydia Goehr, and Henry Alexander, whom I thank especially forhis enduring encouragement. From Richard Eldridge I received not only one but two extremely astute, constructive, and very finely detailed readings of earlier versions, both of which proved enormously helpful. I thank as well the National En­ dowment for the Humanities for supporting my work in Cam­ bridge and my participation in the Institute for Theory and Interpretation in the Visual Arts at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in 1 987. Of the many people to whom I am indebted from that utopian experience I must particularly mention Mi­ chael Podro and Annabel Wharton for sustained conversation on a range of aesthetic issues. Also, my good friends Allen Cox, Edward Wight, and the late Howard Roberts helped with many conversations i.n their areas of expertise (painting, musicology, and music performance respectively). I also acknowledge my debt to Bard College not only for providing a superb context for aesthetic scholarship but also for supporting-further work in Cambridge with an Asher B. Edelman fellowship, and my debt to my colleagues in philosophy, William Griffithand Dan­ iel Berthold-Bond, whose philosophical engagement I have found consistently inspiring. Chapter 5 was previously published in slightly differentform in Philosophy and Literature 1 3 (April 1 989): 75-95, edited by Denis Dutton; I thank the Johns Hopkins University Press for permission.to incorporate it here and the editor for publishing the piece initially. The remainder of the work is published here for the first time. Last, I am indebted to Roger Haydon of Cornell University Press, who has given this project much in addition to the patient encouragement it needed, and to An- Acknowledgments x 1 drew Lewis, whose very fine copy-editing proved extremely helpful at the final stages. All of the above-mentioned people have made this a better work than it would have been without them (although it does not follow from this fact that any of them would agree with what I've written); indeed, given the quantity and quality of the support this work has enjoyed, it is very much more than a pro fo rma move in a narrowly circumscribed language-game to say that with regard to any remaining flaws, I am entirely on my own. Carol Brener, Kathleen Elliot, Rene Horley, Kathleen Jacob, Marie Ratchford, and Janice Russ very kindly and pa­ tiently prepared the manuscripts, and to them I remain ex­ tremely grateful. GARRY HAGBERG Annandale-on-Hudson, New York Meaning & Interpretation � Introduction Given the importance of the concept of meaning to discussions of the arts and literature, and given the importance of the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein to our understanding of that concept, it seems somewhat curious that scholars in aes­ thetics and literary theory have made no more use of Wittgen­ stein's potentially illuminating work than they have. In this book I attempt to do exactly that, in the hope of shedding some light on the relations between linguistic and artistic meaning, between understanding persons and understanding works of art, and between literary interpretation and philosophical anal­ ysis. I hope to achieve results more affirmative or positive in nature than those usually associated with philosophy and crit­ icism of a broadly Wittgensteinian sort. Indeed, the Wittgen­ steinian tradition has often been construed as little more than a project of confusion-removal, which closes and narrows rather than opens and expands explanatory directions and pos­ sibilities. I have much more to say about the more affirmative and illuminating aspects of the Wittgensteinian tradition, and about the dubiousness of the distinction between constructive and critical methodological categories. At present, however, a few words are in order about how Wittgenstein's work has been 2 Meaning & Interpretation received by those working within the disciplinary boundaries of aesthetics and literary criticism. Wittgenstein's idea of family resemblance, as a contribution to the problem of universals, has been applied to the problem of definiition in the arts, and this application has profoundly changed the expectations within aesthetics of how discussions of definition in the arts could proceed. 1 Wittgenstein's work on aspect perception and the nature of imaginative seeing has also been applied to the study of the interrelations between the perceiver and the perceived, and this work has profoundly changed expectations within aesthetics of how discussions of those problems would proceed. 2 And that seems to be the ex­ tent of the acknowledged significanceof Wittgenstein's philos­ ophy for aesthetic theory; the not-unreasonable consensus­ given the limited range of Wittgenstein's work that has been examined-is that this integration of Wittgenstein's influence has been completed and that the time has come to return to the fundamental task of theory construction.3 As I attempt to i. See, for example, Morris Weitz, "The Role of Theory in Aesthetics," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15 (Fall 1957), and "Wittgenstein's Aes­ thetics," in Language and Aesthetics, ed. B. R. Tilghman (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1973). 2. See, forexample, Virgil Aldrich, Philosophy ofArt (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963); Roger Scruton, Art and Imagination (London: Methuen, 1974); and John Casey, The Language of Criticism (London: Methuen, 1966). 3. See Maurice Mandelbaum, "Family Resemblances and Generalizations Concerning the Arts," American Philosophical Quarterly 2 Quly 1965); George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974); Ted Cohen, "The Possibility of Art: Remarks on a Proposal by Dickie," Philosophical Review 82 (1973): 69-82; and B. R. Tilghman, But Is It Art? (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984). Further contributions to the investigation of the significance of Witt­ genstein's philosophy for aesthetics are Richard Shusterman, "Wittgenstein and Critical Reasoning," Philosophy and PhenomenologicalResearch 4 7 (September 1986); Richard Eldridge, "Problems and Prospects of Wittgensteinian Aes­ thetics," journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 45 (Spring 1978); Carolyn Kors­ meyer, "Wittgenstein and the Ontological Problem of Art," The Personalist 59 (April 1978); Roger A.