Abstract

Zumhagen-Yekplé reads Wittgenstein’s Tractatus resolutely, alongside the “Ithaca” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, arguing that looking at Wittgenstein in this way offers new dimensions for understanding Wittgenstein’s relationship to modernism that are otherwise unavailable through more traditional readings of the Tractatus. Zumhagen-Yekplé traces the shared aspects of Wittgenstein’s and Joyce’s counter-epiphanic aesthetic practices, concentrating on the explorations they conduct in their respective modernist puzzle texts of the issues of difficulty, question, quest and yearning for transformation (which she argues are a central secular-spiritual concern of European high modernism) while also attending to important differences between their respective projects. In propositions that attest to Tolstoy’s influence on his thinking, Wittgenstein writes of a worldview he calls “happy,” an outlook of acceptance deeply connected to his notion of “seeing the world in the right way” and his enigmatic statement that the solution to the problem of life is to be seen in its vanishing. Zumhagen-Yekplé explores the ways in which Bloom, Joyce’s own long-doubting, questioning and questing modern “Everyman or Noman” becomes an unexpected literary exemplar of a person who looks upon the world and its problems with this “happy” attitude. She argues that the differences in Joyce’s and Wittgenstein’s divergent treatments of what Wittgenstein describes in the Tractatus as “seeing the world aright” not only shed light on the continuity of Wittgenstein’s “early” and “late” philosophy, they also give us new purchase on the evolution of Wittgenstein’s philosophical method from the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations.