Wittgenstein Jr by Lars Iyer

 

In Wittgenstein Jr, Lars Iyer sets out to create an alternative Ludwig Wittgenstein, living in contemporary Cambridge and appalled, as the real Wittgenstein was, by what he sees around him, the indolence of the dons, the artificiality of academic life. Because this is contemporary, though, the artificiality has a different genesis: while it was the dons’ lack of effort the real Wittgenstein deplored, now it their constant chasing of funding, the commercialisation of academia, the loss of education as a tool to improve human society. As ever with Iyer, and with any good satire, there is a real target for the jokes and barbs and rejoinders. Modernity is a cold-blooded thing, beholden to the great god commercialism.

The eponymous Wittgenstein Jr is a philosophy lecturer at Cambridge, a man struggling with his philosophical explorations of logic and reason and their place in the real world. He is given his nickname by his students, a diverse group of undergraduates who are drinking, fornicating and tripping their way through their academic careers. They are frustrated by Wittgenstein Jr’s inability to actually teach them anything. Rather, he asks them gnomic questions without deigning (or being able) to provide answers. At one point, he tells them:

Beware clarity ... Beware the well-trodden path! But beware obscurity, too! Beware the never-trodden path! Avoid explanation ... But also avoid obfuscation. Suspect conclusions. But suspect inconclusiveness, too.

Joseph Knecht he is not.

Gradually, though, his students realise (or some of them, anyway, over the weeks the class size shrinks from 45 to 12) that he is trying to teach them something. His style may be unorthodox, he may not seem entirely in control of his faculties, but through his constant questioning he is directing them to live their lives. Philosophy is the examination of logic and reason, but it can only be experienced through reality. For this reason, Wittgenstein is a great admirer of St Augustine, who famously prayed: “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet”, before converting to Christianity and becoming a priest. This was a man who lived, and through living he learned. Joseph Knecht made flesh.

But while the students gradually come to an accommodation with their lecturer, Wittgenstein Jr struggles to live up to his own ideals. This is when the novel begins to take form and we understand it is not just a random rendering of the chaotic lives and peculiar lectures of this group of Cambridge undergrads. In particular, the narrator, Peters, begins to draw closer to Wittgenstein Jr and starts to break through the intensity that drives his sense of vocation and his dedication to the life philosophical.

Like his more recent Nietzsche andthe Burbs, Wittgenstein Jr is a strange novel, comprising short fragments, moments in the unstructured lives of the protagonists, told in non-judgmental, forthright terms. It is also very funny. The sincerity of Wittgenstein Jr’s philosophical quest is counterpointed to great comic effect by the dissoluteness of his students and we are drawn into a wonderful send-up of academic life in the twenty-first century.

The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse

 

In his contemporaneous review of The Glass Bead Game, Werner Vortriede suggested that, because of its length and because of Hesse’s age, it might be considered his last will. If it is not quite that, it certainly seems reasonable to reflect that it is a summation of Hesse’s life and thought. The Glass Bead Game is a humanist commitment to the vitality of everyday existence, a plea that learning and knowledge do not become ends in themselves but are harnessed to the furtherance of human society. Hesse describes the vision as encompassing ‘wise men and poets and scholars harmoniously building the valued and vaulted cathedral of Mind.’ A cathedral, then, something to be venerated, but a cathedral to enterprise, functional, reflecting the currents of human endeavour.

The Glass Bead Game of the novel’s title is, it initially appears, the ultimate achievement of human culture. The novel takes place some four or five hundred years in the future, in a world that has passed beyond what is described as the feuilletonistic age (that is, our own current society) in which war and conflict have predominated, and in which culture is trivialised and coarsened. The action is set in the broadly mid-European country of Waldzell, a secular state enjoying peace and prosperity. In particular, it focuses on Castalia, a pedagogical province where the academic pursuit of pure knowledge has become an aesthetic discipline, personified most significantly by the Glass Bead Game.

This, although its precise nature is never fully explained, is a philosophical game in which glass beads are used to demonstrate the progress of the players through the days during which a game may take place. The goal is to find interconnectedness in the realms of arts and knowledge – the precise mathematical notation of a Bach fugue or Chinese influences in music and literature and so on. It calls for remarkable and wide-ranging cultural knowledge and an ability to make and demonstrate subtle connections. Essentially, it is an attempt to discover a grand unified theory. Games are played according to strictly prescribed rules, and are comprehensible only to a limited number of trained experts. These players are revered for their erudition and remain cloistered within the community of Castalia like medieval monks in a monastery, under the leadership of the Magister Ludi, the Master of the game.

This pursuit of cultural perfection, then, has become a secular religion. And in all of this, it is music which is pre-eminent, the masterful art form from which everything else takes shape and meaning. Thus, our first introduction to Joseph Knecht, the hero of the novel, a young man who will rise through Castalian society to become Magister Ludi, is as a child learning from the Music Master and showing, from this early age, a remarkable aptitude and sympathy for music.

If all is peace and tranquility in the post-feuilletonistic age, and if the elite of human society is free to ruminate on the creation of aesthetic perfection through the Glass Bead Game, one might assume that the future vision being created by Hesse is therefore one of utopia. It is, though, far from that. Castalia is a state in decline and it remains, moreover, largely ignorant of the fact, even denying it when confronted with the truth in Joseph Knecht’s letter of resignation. Castalia, then, is reduced to stasis, a state going nowhere, achieving nothing. Perhaps, an idealist might argue, such a state of affairs is sufficient if it ensures contentment, wealth, peace for the inhabitants, some Benthamite idyll of the greatest good for the greatest number. But how does one judge what represents the greatest good for the greatest number? Do we mean those people living in the here and now? Or those to come? If what you are doing now, while creating an environment of stately comfort for the majority, will nonetheless undoubtedly lead to decay and downfall at some stage in the near future, can this action still be categorised as the greatest good for the greatest number? Hesse’s novel firmly answers in the negative.

Castalia may have overcome the Feuilletonistic age, but to what end? It has become a dry, sterile, solipsistic world, inward and devoted only to the glorification of art, dismissive of history, politics or anything of practical value. This is not, surely, something to be aspired to? And, furthermore, let us examine its approach to the arts, because it reveals a decidely unartistic, uncreative approach. Invention is deprecated, innovation is a foible only of the young and naive. True art, for the Castalian, does not involve creation as we would understand it: it is merely a form of intellectual exegesis, making connections, drawing parallels, using one form to shed light on another. But nothing is created as a result, only a game, mimesis. It is knowledge for the sake of knowledge, with no end product and no aspiration. That is not art, that is not culture, that is not the free enunciation of the human spirit. Further, this husk of creativity is presided over by a self-selecting elite, far removed from the interference of non-Castalians. That is nothing short of cultural despotism: Castalia, then, is a future-world fascist state in which all creative thought is restricted and channeled into official forms. It is a mirror of the Fascist world Hesse inhabited while he wrote The Glass Bead Game, in which the Nazi weltanschauung and its glorification of myth is replaced by the pointless glorification of art: a mirror, but the reflection is equally vile.

In the novel, then, we follow Joseph Knecht from being a frightened but hopeful child falling under the spell of the Music Master through to his assumption of the great office of Magister Ludi, the culmination of his aspirations. His journey is not straightforward and, along the way, he encounters wise and able men who will greatly inform his future career. Doubts settle in his mind. While still a young student he confronts Plinio Designori, the son of a wealthy industrialist who, because of his family’s standing, is being educated in Castalia. An outsider, he is highly critical of Castalian ways and the two boys engage in lengthy philosophical debates and finally, through their confrontations, become friends. Later, Knecht makes a pilgrimage to visit the Elder Brother, a mystical hermit steeped in Chinese philosophy, from whom Knecht begins to learn self-knowledge and transcendence. On an ambassadorial trip to the Benedictine monastery in Mariafels, Knecht encounters Father Jacobus and is confronted by the narrowness of Castalian vision, the shortcomings of their renunciation of history as any meaningful field of study, their insularity and consequent naïve vulnerability to the machinations of the rude world beyond. His doubts increase.

The Music Master and the Elder Brother are, in complementary ways, Knecht’s guides to spiritual peace and understanding; Plinio Designori is his link to the real world; Thomas van der Trave, Knecht’s predecessor as Magister Ludi, is his guide to the ways of Castalia and the dignified performance of civic duty. By comparison Fritz Tegularius, the wayward Nietzschean outsider, shows Knecht that there is an alternative to the stultified, tradition-bound ways of Castalia, a free-thinking but highly dangerous, possibly mad, approach to life and order. While those in Castalia deprecate such activity, Knecht accepts, even encourages it. He is of Castalia, but not wholly subsumed by it. And this sets the template for all of his relationships, while making inevitable his eventual renunciation of high office and retreat into real life.

Thus, Knecht stands at the centre of a series of binaries – Castalia and the world, the Glass Bead Game and realpolitik, secular reason and religious observance, pedagogy and pragmatic action, teachers and students, servitude and mastery, self and others, inwardness and outwardness, yin and yang, the vita activa and the vita contemplativa. Castalian – and western – society tends to exaggerate these binaries, forcing them to stand in opposition to one another. This is the way to dogma, Hesse warns. In the case of Castalia it will lead, as Knecht comes to realise, to its inevitable decline, divorced as it is from reality. For the real world, brute forces – military or economic – stand isolated from the culture that can be derived through an understanding of aesthetic beauty. Secularity loses an element of grace, while monastic life underestimates the importance of the human. Individuation at the expense of connection with society leads, as with the Elder Brother, in his remote hermitage, to meaningless isolation. Knecht, placed between these binary opposites, cognisant of the strengths and weaknesses of each, comes to understand how a path may be established which avoids their extremes and instead achieves a state of harmony.

It is Father Jacobus, however, who is the key to the novel. The knowledge which permits Knecht’s ultimate leap in understanding is initially latent, undeveloped. It is through Father Jacobus that Knecht truly comes to understand that the rarefied study of aesthetics and art, divorced from realpolitik, can only end in terminal decline, while pragmatism is the key to understanding how true harmony must be achieved by the synthesis of the discrete worldviews offered by Castalia, the monastery, the outside world and the searchers for self-knowledge. Without Father Jacobus, it is likely that Knecht would have remained a successful Magister Ludi for the rest of his days, presiding unknowingly over the decline of the organisation he loved. Instead, he renounces his magistracy and, in so doing, saves both Castalia and himself.

Essentially then, the novel revolves around the need to ‘know thyself’, the continuous, often painful, always difficult process of attaining self-awareness. This can only be achieved, Hesse argues, through disciplined discipleship under sages who can teach the way to enlightenment, and through consequent renunciation of all but the intellectual pursuit of self-knowledge. It is an ascetic life, to be sure. Thus, Knecht believes himself to be following his calling throughout his career, devoting himself first to the Music Master, learning at the feet of the Elder Brother, Father Jacobus, the Magister Ludi and so on, all the while progressing seamlessly through the echelons of Castalian society. But this, he finds, is not his destiny, this is not his road to self-awareness. On the contrary, all the trappings of office, the strictures of rigid Castalian life, they serve only to obscure from Knecht his true purpose. And that, he realises finally, is to teach, to pass on the harmonious understanding of life and existence to a new generation, to boys as yet untouched by formal learning and discipline. It is now that Knecht finally reaches some accommodation with his own self and reaches a degree of serenity. In the process, his demeanour changes from polite servility into equally polite assurance. He outgrows Castalia, the Glass Bead Game, the cloistered life of aesthetic reason.

In the end, Knecht gives up the sterility of Castalia as, one feels from the outset, this free-thinking man would inevitably have had to do. He does not turn, however, to the world of the religious order in Mariafels and to the implicit suggestion of politicking that underlies organised religion. Instead, he decides to leave for the real world and do something useful, worthwhile, but still in keeping with his temperament, training and background. He agrees to act at personal tutor to the troublesome son of his old friend Designori. In this way, the main section of the novel ends with another master-pupil relationship, this time with Knecht as the master.

Or is he?

The novel is in five parts, of which the first is the longest and most important. The style of this first part is a challenge, but one which Hesse manages superbly. It is written in a deliberately dry manner, mimicking academic prose and thus always remaining objective and restricting itself entirely to facts. Given this approach, it is inevitable that a certain distancing must be effected between the reader and the protagonist and, it is true, Joseph Knecht, although evidently a good man, does not endear himself to the reader. There is, in his asceticism, something remote about Knecht. And yet, by the end of the Knecht section, Hesse has managed to bring out his essential humanity to the extent that we feel comfortable in the presence of the man. It is an impressive feat of writing.

The remainder of the novel is given over to “writings” by Knecht himself, in which he imagines himself to be a character from a different age and society. In this way, the novel tells four stories relating four reincarnated lives of the same man, Joseph Knecht. In each, what is most important to the human soul and human destiny is the transference of knowledge, understanding and wisdom from person to person, generation to generation. Knowledge can only come from within, but that knowledge can only be released from without.

In truth, these latter stories have nothing of the power of the main narrative, and there is a sense of repetition in them, the feeling that we are being unnecessarily lectured by an author who has already eloquently made his point. But The Glass Bead Game is an astonishing piece of literature.

Mrs Ritchie by Willa Muir

 

Willa and Edwin Muir escaped parochial Scotland in the 1920s, living and working in Germany and enjoying the culture of that nation and the importance the arts played in the development of its unique weltanschauung. They were true internationalists, part of the Scottish renaissance that included Hugh McDiarmid, Catherine Carswell, Naomi Mitchison and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Like others of the renaissance, left-leaning and forward-looking, the Muirs had to reconcile the inherent tension between nationalism and internationalism. These viewpoints are not, as might at first be supposed, antithetical, but rather can be combined harmoniously. This may only happen, however, if the nationalism is an open and affirmative one, optimistic, bold, aspirational.

And this was not the aesthetic the Muirs left behind in cold, Calvinist Scotland. Where Germany was devoted to new ideas and new life, Scottish society seemed premised on keeping everyone in their places, on abjuring ambition, developing almost a blockade of progress. This, of course, was particularly the case when it came to the role of women in contemporary life, and this subject was a passion of Willa Muir’s.

It is an all too predictable injustice that Willa Muir is now less well-remembered than her husband, but Mrs Ritchie, her first novel, has an absolutely savage intensity and offers a searing critique of the stultifying, unfulfilling lives of women in the 1920s and 1930s. It is somewhat old-fashioned in its approach, with its intense psychological analyses of the characters and their actions, but it remains an astonishing novel.

It follows the progress of Annie Rattray’s life, from a bright, if intense child growing up in the fictional town of Calderwick (based on Montrose) at the back end of the nineteenth century, to a broken harridan furiously awaiting judgement day in the years following the Great War. Annie, someone prone to taking any idea to its logical conclusion and then much, much further, becomes obsessed by her presbyterian fears of judgement and sin and eternal damnation. At one point, we are told:

[Annie’s] God frowned upon all other demonstrations of feeling [than indignation], for to open one’s heart in joy to the world was to invite the devil; but righteous indignation was an emotion to which no blame could possibly be attached.

What emerges is the self-fulfilling consequence of such a tyrannical imposition of social mores and religious beliefs. Young Annie Rattray grows into Mrs Ritchie and a child downtrodden and repressed becomes a woman whose sole mission is to inflict the same injustice on her own children, in the name of God and in the hope of everlasting salvation. It is an obscenity that has been wrought on generations of Scots.

However, Muir is critiquing more than Scotland’s baleful Calvinist instincts. She was deeply concerned by the dangers of patriarchy, and the wounds it inflicted on women and on society in general. While Mrs Ritchie is truly a monstrous woman, she was made so by the male-dominated society in which she lived. A clever child, she was offered the glittering bounty of a grammar school education, only for it to be snatched from her. Poor, working class girls didn’t do that. One of Annie’s earliest influences, Miss Julia, sums up what her future should be:

To wish to become a domestic [help] in some Christian family, what a proper ambition for a young, unprotected female!

The novel also offers a savage critique of war, in particular the Great War. The experiences of Mrs Ritchie’s son, John Samuel, and the psychological trauma it wreaks on him, are beautifully but harrowingly written. At one stage, John Samuel writes of his experiences to his sister, Sarah Annie, and it scars her, too:

Sarah Annie kept that letter under lock and key. But she could not keep it out of her mind, especially whenever she saw a detachment of soldiers marching through the streets to entrain for the Front. The tears would come into her eyes, a hysterical lump would rise in her throat; there went Everyman, marching to his death; there went Everyman, having shed his individuality, his spiritual values, become merely a numbered animal whose vitality and courage were doomed to mechanical extinction.

This, then, is the inevitable concomitant of a society which seeks to repress individual thought, to make hollow the hopes and aspirations of its young, to ensure that nothing changes. Because, ultimately, everything changes, for good or ill.

Mrs Ritchie is not a flawless book. Kirsty Allen, in her doctoral thesis on Muir, writes that:

the novel moves remorselessly towards its relentless conclusion and the three-dimensional complexity of human nature is sacrificed to the pursuit of a psychological absolute.

There is truth in this, and the novel becomes somewhat unbalanced by the end, something which Muir herself acknowledged many years later, when she said: “I lost control of it in the second half, although the first half is quite good.” Contemporary criticism, though, was decidedly mixed. The Scotsman wrote of it:

Mrs Ritchie is Greek drama in the kail-yard. Psychology takes the place of the gods, but is no less ruthless and long of memory than they were. . . . [T]he result is a novel more admirable than likeable. It rouses fear but not pity, and makes one wonder if ever a woman was quite so mad inwardly and so sane outwardly as Mrs Ritchie, whether in life there is not always some breaking up and blending together of that madness and that sanity.

The casual connection of Mrs Ritchie to the kailyard is inappropriate and wrong. This novel is as far from JM Barrie’s Thrums or JJ Bell’s Wee McGreegor as it’s possible to be. What it puts me in mind of most, oddly enough, is a writer for whom I suspect Willa Muir would have held no sympathy, Flannery O’Connor.

Like the distorted presbyterian lens through which Scots Calvinists viewed the world, O’Connor held a Roman Catholic worldview that was extreme in its fundamentalism. The Old Testament wasn’t enough for O’Connor: the Douay-Rhiems translation, dense and polemical, formed the basis of her thought and was the blueprint for her fiction. When I see Mrs Ritchie, systematically destroying her family in the name of God, I hear the laughter of Flannery O’Connor as she enjoyed the privations of her characters in the name of redemption, the buggery of Tarwater by the devil, the death of Haze Motes, the grandmother killed by The Misfit in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”.

People who see only a purity of purpose lose sight of the humanity that lies shattered in its wake.