Finding A Replacement For The Soul: Mind And Meaning In Literature And Philosophy

Finding a Replacement for the Soul Finding a Replacement for the Soul Mind and Meaning in Literature and Philosophy BRETT BOURBON HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England Copyright © 2004 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bourbon, Brett, 1963Finding a replacement for the soul: mind and meaning in literature and philosophy / Brett Bourbon. p. em. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-674-01297-6 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Literature-Philosophy. 2. Meaning (Philosophy) in literature. 3. Joyce, James, 1882-1941. Finnegans wake. 4. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889-1951. Philosophische Untersuchungen. 1. Title. PN56.M37B682004 801-dc22 2004040600 For my parents Contents Preface lX Note on Abbreviations Introduction: PART I What Are We When We Are Not? XVl 1 THE SURFACE OF LANGUAGE AND THE ABSENCE OF MEANING 1 From Soul-Making to Person-Making 27 2 The Logical Form of Fiction 50 3 The Emptiness of Literary Interpretation 80 4 To Be But Not To Mean 101 5 How Do Oracles Mean? 121 PART II SENSES AND NONSENSES: JOYCE'S FINNEGANS WAKE AND WITTGENSTEIN'S PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS 6 A Twitterlitter of Nonsense: Askesis at Finnegans Wake 145 7 The Analogy between Persons and Words 168 8 "The Human Body Is the Best Picture of the Human Soul" 192 Contents Vll1 9 The Senses of Time 10 216 Being Something and Meaning Something 238 Bibliography 261 Acknowledgments 269 Index 271 Preface How are things with you? The answer can be simple or endless. We respond with shrugs and intonations, with stories and jokes, with reticence and embellishment. We cry and we laugh. Fictions and poems formalize the means by which we answer how things are with us. They offer various examples of the kinds of answers we give. Our generic answers, like our most banal generic art, simplify to 'not bad,' 'so-so,' or 'OK.' These expressions, however, like our best generic art, can carry more significance than at first seems possible, depending on how the answers fit with further expressions and understandings. If we take the question seriously, view it with some wonder and puzzlement, we may need to decide what will count as an answer, especially if we ask it of ourselves. Asking how are things with ourselves and requiring that we decide what will count as an answer match the demands of modern art, where we have to decide what will count as art, which is to say what will count as meaningful. To judge our situation and ourselves is to give them a provisional meaning. Doubts and questions about the very means of providing and discovering this meaning are at least one motive for some modernist experiments in writing and thinking. This is a book about our ways of making and losing meaning. My targets for investigation include sentences, fictions, poems, actions, persons, and lives. These all are easily misseen; misseen because what x Preface they are is bound to how they mean, and how they mean is partly an expression of how we are involved with language. This involvement tells us more about ourselves and the world than we might imagine; it also offers the site for the justification of the study of literature. I take up both of these projects: I will discover what I can about what we are such that we are inv