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Marjorie Perloff. Widtgenstein's Ladder. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Ludwig Wittgenstein's place in philosophy is certain, but (for good or bad) he has yet to be embraced by literary theory, which remains firmly under sway of Continental philosophy. Despite this neglect, Majorie Perloff demonstrates in Wittgenstein's Ladder Wittgenstein's proposition, the limits of my mean limits of my world; his method of inquiry layers question upon questions; his gravitation towards metaphysics and spirituality; and his concern for ethics, all bear directly upon twentiethcentury literature and literary study. Perloff gleans from Wittgenstein four concepts-the strangeness in ordinary; implicit limitations of and knowledge; self-ascultural construct; and nonexistence of propositions of absolute valueand uses them to argue for his obvious relevance to literary studies. Using these four concepts as a philosophical frame, Wittgenstein 's Ladder explores connections between Wittgenstein's philosophy and writing of Beckett, Creeley, Bernhard, Silliman, Waldrop, Hejinian, and others. Perloff says her goal is to examine relationship of Wittgenstein's mode of investigation, in all of its contradictoriness, its stringent and severe self-revision and critique, its cryptic and aphoristic formulations and epiphanies, to language poetics so central to our time. (22) Wittgenstein's Ladder engages in a textual counterpoint moves effortlessly between Wittgenstein and these writers and reveals a number of intriguing affinities. For example, third chapter, `Grammar in Use': Wittgenstein/Gertrude Stein/Marinetti, juxtaposes Wittgenstein's idea meaning is bound to its context and use-what Wittgenstein calls Grammar of meaning-with prose and poetry by Stein. In doing so, Perloff illuminates ideas and practices of both Stein and Wittgenstein: [F]or [Stein], as for Wittgenstein, what mattered was how people actually put words and sentences together and how they understood one another. We were sure, we read halfway through Marry Nettie, that steam was coming out of water. It makes noise. A wonderfully droll pseudoexplanation may be glossed by following proposition from Philosophical Investigations: Of course, if water boils in a pot, steam comes out of pot and also pictured steam comes out of pictured pot. But what if one insisted on saying there must also be something boiling in picture of pot? Like Wittgenstein, Gertrude Stein took ordinary so seriously she would have appreciated absurdity (and yet necessity) of question about water boiling in pictured pot. (112) Perloff further justifies her pairing of these writers with Wittgenstein, and her suggested network of implicit and/or explicit affinities, by emphasizing Wittgenstein's remark Philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry. At this level of form, Perloff reveals how she reads Wittgenstein, and to what end: My own interest is less in what 'says' about propositionality, tautology, etc., than in what it is, especially in its later sections, which break abruptly with 'clarity' of its opening and turn to matters of ethics and religion in a series of utterances.... (19) And again, I am less interested in central 'argument' of Investigations-a topic on which philosophers have produced a huge library-than in what [Stanley] Cavell calls `spiritual struggle' dramatized in its pages... (19) Perloff is interested in how Wittgenstein's philosophy approximates poetry and poetic form as spiritual struggle and gnomic utterance, and at one point she goes so far as to state Tractatus must be understood as a poetic construct (45). Therefore, best way to read Wittgenstein is poetically, with particular attention devoted to how ideas are put together. …
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