Witcraft in 1901 and 1951 - a distinguished crankologist is prepared to give lessons in this important subject

In 1901, William James gives a series of lectures in Edinburgh that will become The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).  In 1951, Ludwig Wittgenstein dies.  James and Wittgenstein guide us through Witcraft’s English philosophy for almost two hundred and fifty pages (the chapters are getting pretty long).

1901 features more Mill, now a radical and feminist, and more Carlyle, now a hero of the new Labour Party.  Darwin, Spencer and Huxley are dragging philosophy in a new direction, as are Marx and Engels.  The first great philosophical craze, though, as we have discussed before at Wuthering Expectations, is for Arthur Schopenhauer, taken up by every decadent and aesthete, to be followed by the Nietzsche craze.  Also Hegel: “Before long Hegel-worship was taking hold in England too” (393).  In the 1951 chapter, it’s Kierkegaard; in a theoretical 2001 chapter, it would be Sartre and Derrida and various other French writers.  I would not mind reading a literary or book history of received philosophy.  It explains a lot (of what is in novels).

For example:

For some of Nietzsche’s followers, however, profundity was not enough.  Their leader was a self-styled ‘man of affairs’ who was a political agitator in Australia before surfacing in Chicago under the name of Ragnar Redbeard…  ‘Death to the weakling, wealth to the strong,’ he added… The full doctrine was set out in a pamphlet called Might is Right…  Redbeard’s propaganda struck a chord with a young student in California called Jack London, helping turn him into a writer who aimed, as he put it, to proclaim ‘the paean of the strong with all my heart’, while ‘raging  through life without end like one of Nietzsche’s blond beasts’. (390)

Ragnar Redbeard!  This chapter is filled with interesting figures who were not themselves significant writers, but who were great propagators, most notable the Scot Thomas Davidson who “by vocation” was “a rebellious vagabond” of high intellectual powers, who drifted around Britain and the United States thinking and teaching, often in philosophical clubs.  “Davidson got on well with the ‘St Louis Hegelians’, as he called them – yes, a St. Louis specific Hegel-craze, headquartered in the St. Louis Mercantile Library, which I urged you to visit in this post.

Here we see a page of advertisements in the special Christmas edition of Mind! magazine (1901, p. 457).  I have adopted “a distinguished crankologist” as my new self-description, even though I am not particularly distinguished.  Am I ever prepared to give lessons.  I’ve been delivering them on this very website for years.

The long 1951 chapter is essentially a “life and times” of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who I take as a hero of Jonathan Rée’s, an exemplar of the practice of philosophy.  He barely publishes.  He is always thinking and talking, working on the most difficult problems.  His intelligence is astounding; who knows what he could have done if he had remained an engineer.  He has a perpetually complicated, comical, relationship with universities.

Bertrand Russell becomes, in the narrative, something of a villain, a corruption of philosophy.  I don’t know that Rée thinks of Russell as a villain, but narratives have their own logic.

The chapter’s title is “A Collection of Nonsense”:

The main topic of his classes [this is 1929] was still nonsense (or ‘nonsense in the philosophical sense’, as one of his students put it), and he spoke with great animation, sometimes rapidly, with dashes of ‘schoolboyish English slang’, sometimes slowing down and sinking into silence, ‘with perspiration streaming down his face’.  Students were often bewildered, but the effect was ‘hypnotic’. (475)

I suppose I see part of my attraction to Witcraft here.  I take nonsense, and not necessarily in the philosophical sense, as the basis of literature, with meaning and mimesis and all of that built on top of and out of language.  Ideas are made of language.  It is great fun to play with language, but it is also full of traps.  “Philosophy as [Wittgenstein] saw it was ‘not a theory’, but the practice of clarifying thoughts that are otherwise ‘opaque and blurred’” (613).  I do not see literature so differently. So Witcraft is a congenial book.

But it is a big book, too.  There are many other things a reader could do with it.

The expensive vagueness of The Wings of the Dove - It almost destroyed me, thinking it all out

So it’s not just me.  I’m glad to know that.  Here is William James writing to his brother in 1902:

I have read The Wings of the Dove (for which all thanks!) but what shall I say of a book constructed on a method which so belies everything that I acknowledge as law?  You’ve reversed every traditional canon of story-telling (especially the fundamental one of telling the story, which you carefully avoid) and have created a new genre littéraire which I can’t help thinking perverse, but in which you nevertheless succeed, for I read with interest to the end (many pages, and innumerable sentences twice over to see what the dickens they could possibly mean)…  At any rate it is your own…

My premise is that William James has first, the intelligence of William James, and second, at this point almost forty years of experience reading the complete works of Henry James, so if he had this kind of trouble, I should not be surprised at my own.

I have the advantage of having read a century’s worth of subsequent novels that avoid their stories even more ruthlessly than those of James – am I ever used to that – but the writers I think of as the most Jamesian don’t write sentences like those.  Saul Bellow or Alan Hollinghurst or Hotel du Lac, those are examples I have in mind.  The sentences do not make me swear on the name of Dickens.  Maybe you know some more cryptic examples.

This is William Dean Howells, also smart and used to James, in “Mr. James’s Later Work” (1903), which he partly writes as a dialogue with “a weary woman” – she is speaking:

“’There they are,’ as he keeps making his people say in all his late books, when they are not calling one another dear lady, and dear man, and prodigious and magnificent, and of a vagueness or a richness, or a sympathy, or an opacity.  No, he is of a tremendosity, but he worries me to death; he kills me; he really gives me a headache.  He fascinates me, but I have no patience with him.”

I took the liberty of adding italics to the words that are directly borrowed from James.  I think some of the others are jokes.  “Tremendosity” is definitely a joke; “opacity” is not in The Wings of the Dove, at least; as for “vagueness,” this is practically a description of the novel:

an impenetrable ring fence, within which there reigned a kind of expensive vagueness made up of smiles and silences and beautiful fictions and priceless arrangements, all strained to breaking  (9.4)

I had wondered if some of the adjectives that James’s characters fling at each other – “wonderful” – were perhaps examples of current slang, something he heard at dinner parties, but I guess not, or at least they were not at the parties Howells attended.  They are mostly signals that I am in James-world, which is not exactly like this one ever was.  The weary woman again:

“We could not bear to lose a word; every word – and there were a good many! – seemed to tell.  If you took one away you seemed to miss something important.  It almost destroyed me, thinking it all out.  I went round days, with my hand to my forehead; and I don’t believe I understand it perfectly yet.  Do you?”

No.  I have two other differences from Howells’s magnificent invention.  First, when I left all the words in I still thought I was missing something important, and second, it turns out I have endless patience with James, so I will bang on about him until I run out of babble.  I didn’t take a fifth as many notes as I did with The Ambassadors, so I won’t go on as long as that.