Monthly Archives: January 2016
Wittgenstein’s Vienna
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Wittgenstein’s Vienna by Allan Janik
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Wittgenstein is a name that looms large on the landscape of twentieth-century philosophy, and one day I’ll get around to actually reading his work. For now though, I’m still dancing around the edges. I’ve written about Logicomix before as a creative introduction to the mathematical and philosophical scene in which Wittgenstein appeared, and about a year ago that led me to an excellent biography on Wittgenstein. This latest book on the philosopher, which had come up several times before in references to Wittgenstein, I found at a university library used book sale. I grabbed it immediately, possibly uttering a small shriek of excitement.
Wittgenstein’s Vienna is a cultural and social contextualization of Wittgenstein’s work. The authors are self-consciously unapologetic that their study is interdisciplinary and not well-suited to the lens of professional philosophy that would view Wittgenstein’s work in terms of the development of analytical philosophy alone. Rather, they say it’s important—essential—in understanding Wittgenstein’s major work to first understand the context in which Wittgenstein wrote, the final days of the Habsburg Empire and its capital Vienna just before the Great War.
By examining the culture of the period—the aesthetic revolts against insincerity and ostentation in music, literature, and architecture centered on the writings of the social critic Karl Kraus—they claim Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as a similar cultural artifact, a philosophical response to this environment. Instead of being intended (as it was perceived by the Logical Positivists) as a groundwork for analytical philosophy, Wittgenstein meant the Tractatus to rigorously define the boundary between facts and values. Critically though this was not to exclude values from the realm of importance (as the Logical Positivists took his famous closing phrase, “of what we cannot speak we must pass over in silence”) but rather to protect ethics and all that was truly important (and unspeakable) in the human experience from the encroachment of logic.
For the authors, Wittgenstein’s work is primarily a cultural, philosophical, and even artistic response to his social environment similar to that of Adolf Loos in architecture and will be (and has been) misunderstood without this broader context. As an example of an interdisciplinary study—and in itself a strong critique of philosophy divorced from context—Wittgenstein’s Vienna is wonderful. It takes a real problem—the interpretation of a famously eccentric man and his undeniably influential work—and it offers an answer grounded in full-bodied exploration of that man’s time and context.
My complaint is that though the arguments are compelling and even a pleasure to read, and though the authors make Habsburg Vienna come to life and illuminate things from the origins of modernism to the perils of political stagnation and the linguistic relations between subject peoples at the dawn of Eastern European nationalism, they tend to let a general zeitgeist form the mode of connection between all this and Wittgenstein. That is, a stronger argument would have connected the dots more firmly, including perhaps more of Wittgenstein’s correspondence and biographical links between Wittgenstein and the key cultural players, Kraus in particular. The authors argue that Kraus was central to creating and fostering the cultural critique in which they’re placing the Tractates—going so far as to call the Tractates a Krausian work—but I still was left with questions about the contacts and connections between the two men.
The work is multifaceted and branched off into lots of interesting side-trails along the way of contextualizing Wittgenstein and his work. There were, for instance, arguments related to the birth of modernism, particularly modern architecture. The authors claim, for instance, that the architecture of Loos was a revolt against ostentation and ornament for it’s own sake, that Loos thought use should dictate design. But they say once this mode was established, its minimalism became itself a new orthodoxy: modernism for its own sake, which gave rise to the Cartesian office buildings and apartments of today in which function is completely masked by uniformity, exactly the opposite of what early modernists like Loos had intended.
This work is compelling because it mixes together so many disciplines. Whether or not you’ve heard of Wittgenstein, if you’re interested in the history of philosophy and in particular the philosophy of language, Habsburg Europe, cultural history, art history, or even social criticism, there’s something in here that you can latch onto. Good books have lots of doors that open outward; this one is full of them.
American Gods
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Neil Gaiman’s work is a good example of the law of conservation of narrative: story is neither created nor destroyed; it is simply transformed from one form to another. Gaiman’s novel American Gods could have been a hundred different things, representing the new gods of America in a hundred different ways. But instead it’s something significant, because Gaiman knows the first rule of original story-telling: know the original stories.
This is what’s wrong with a lot of writing today: it’s shallow. Much of it seems to be written in a vacuum. But the thing about writing (and especially fantasy) is that for it to be really alive, for the story to be rich, it needs to draw on deep wells. And these wells— as American Gods illustrates— go all the way back to the beginning. Gaiman weaves a new and compelling story, a story about the new gods and the old gods in America, but he does it because he understands the building-blocks of the oldest tales.
If you’re looking for a modern story-teller archetype, Neil Gaiman is it. He accumulated a nearly inexhaustible supply of capital and credibility with the classic Sandman series of graphic novels, where he showed he had the knowledge and skill to weave with a rich and textured fabric, pulling in literary figures from Orpheus to Chesterton. To be honest though, after Sandman I found most of Gaiman’s work— Neverwhere, Stardust, the movies Coraline and Mirrormask— to be a bit disappointing (though I liked M is for Magic). Like I said though, he has inexhaustible credibility, so I when I found American Gods in paperback on my sister’s tall brick shelves, I took it home.
This is the Gaiman I remember from Sandman: raw, epic, and dark in a way that shimmers toward opalescence, like the sheen on a serpent’s back. Gaiman’s world is haunting and beautiful; it’s elegant and terrifying; it draws on the deep joy of Chesterton and the riddled wisdom of Gene Wolfe (both of whose words make appearances in this book) with a more pagan flavor. But not an anti-Christian paganism; more like a pre-Christian paganism, a paganism of the deep forests where Christ is still a rumor of Rome on the horizon.
American Gods is the story of a man named Shadow (and this is where Gaiman’s narrative credibility comes in: only he could give a protagonist in a fantasy novel such a trite name and have it stick and work). Shadow has just gotten out of prison and is traveling home, when he runs into a figure who recruits him for a coming war. It turns out that our country has become a battleground between gods of the old world (Europe, Asia, and Africa, primarily) and the new gods of America (things like Media, Internet, and other intangibles as well as gods of industry, railroad, and transportation).
If it sounds a bit transcendental, it’s not. Gaiman keeps it grounded in physicality. Apart from Shadow’s annoying tendency to have significant plot points revealed through dreams (though in fairness he’s spending a lot of time in communication with Native American deities), Gaiman’s gods are very physical: they screw, smoke, swear, throw punches, and try to assassinate each other.
Like I said, a master of old stories. Look some up. This is what the gods spent their time doing.
I can’t go into the plot much at all without dropping spoilers, because even in the very first chapter there are twists and turns. The whole book is a riddle, and there are pleasing knots throughout. The narrative follows Shadow, about whom we continue to learn more, as he works with a man named Wednesday (whose identity readers familiar with mythology will work out fairly quickly) to recruit the old gods— those brought to America by immigrants— in a coming battle against the new.
If you know your mythology, you’ll recognize figures as they’re introduced, but you certainly won’t recognize everyone. Gaiman doesn’t keep his mythology confined to a specific ethnicity. There are gods and monsters from all across the map, several of whom I didn’t know. And Gaiman isn’t one to spell everything out for you, putting nice labels on each god as it is introduced.
That said, it’s the riddles that really make this book work. When gods battle, they tend to do it out of sight of mortals, which is why Shadow— a human more or less like us— makes a good lens through which to view the story. We’re forced to figure things out along with him. And the riddles envelop this story like those Russian dolls that fit inside each other. The big riddle of the entire book is revealed at the end, and it’s flawlessly done, something you don’t expect but that you see clues for throughout once you know it. And the smaller, nested riddles— such as the mystery that Shadow stumbles upon in the middle third of the book in a small Northern town— you can amuse yourself by figuring out as you go. In this, Gaiman is definitely a student of Wolfe, though unlike his master Gaiman is more merciful in that by the end of the book he’ll show you how the trick is done.
If you know Gaiman primarily through his softer stuff, be warned: this book is raw. The language is that of a Brit who seasons liberally with profanity (effectively, to be fair). And there’s plenty of sex. And not mere mortal sex either: god-sex. If you blush easily, keep this book on the shelf.
But the book is strong, and besides an excellent tale, Gaiman is saying something here about the nature of narrative and belief itself and even something about the essence of America. It’s a story by someone who loves America with the wide open eyes of an outsider. Gaiman writes about an America that actually exists, as he explains in his introduction, about real roadside attractions and about a culture (albeit one already slightly dated) we’re sure to recognize. More than that though, he talks about what’s happening beneath the surface: what happens to gods and beliefs and stories when they find themselves in this new world.
This is where his work has the most depth, and this is where you get a glimpse of Wolfe and Chesterton peering over his shoulders (or perhaps perched on his shoulders, like the ravens of Odin). In this non-Christian (but not necessarily anti-Christian) polytheistic world, Gaiman’s sympathies are clearly with the old gods with all their arrogance and faded glory, with all their personality. They have something the new, brash, neon gods of commerce and industry lack. As Gaiman has his character Shadow say: I’d prefer the sad roadside attraction to the new gleaming hotel, because there’s something more real there.
America, it turns out, is a bad place for gods. As Gaiman spells out several times, the land isn’t fertile for them. And it’s the land itself lurking in the background of the story, a shadowy figure that’s never a player in the same sense as the (ultimately revealed) figures pulling the strings of even the gods. Gods don’t flourish here like they did in the Old World, and even the new gods arise quickly and fade fast. But this isn’t a work of comparative religion, so Gaiman never really chases this idea or offers us reasons why. And because this is a story to which the monotheistic gods aren’t invited, they’re not a part of Gaiman’s narrative.
But the book isn’t an explanation. It’s a story. The best stories explain some things, but they don’t explain everything. (This is what Biblical literalists forget about the Bible.) It’s a really, really good story about gods in America. It’s also, more significantly, a story about stories: what they do, what they’re for, how they have the power to shape cultures, and what happens to them (or might happen to them) in this brave new world in which we find ourselves.
Stephen Reid Case 