Intermezzo: Grief, chess, Wittgenstein, and love

Sally Rooney has been heralded as the author who speaks for and to millennials, and she is credited with being able to bring together the conditions of modern life and an intellectual interest in love, connection, and personal relationships. Her ability to portray the “delicate dance” of talk between two people is, some reviewers say, unparalleled and marks her out as one of the best novelists writing now.

But not all readers are interested in Rooney’s stories. Some think that she is too much of a romance writer; some think that her novels are too politically didactic; some think that they are too corny.

I’m not sure any of that is false, but maybe those truths don’t point to any particular recommendation. True, life is too short to read bad books. And I’ll admit that I almost gave up on this one, but all in all I’m glad I stuck with it. Maybe the way everything turns out well in the end will seem a bit too much like a fairytale for those who prefer realistic and gritty narratives. And the sex scenes (there are many) are beautifully described—which might make anyone who’s had sex wonder how Rooney could overlook the less lyrical aspects of it. But, as one reviewer said, this novel is more like eating a meal smothered in cream sauce and butter than like eating healthily. And—well—I’m a fan of cream sauce, and think healthy eating is overrated.

But before cream sauce comes some philosophy:

The book begins with an epigram, which is attributed to Ludwig Wittgenstein:

But don’t you feel grief now?

(‘But aren’t you now playing chess?’)

As with so much of Wittgenstein, sometimes these cryptic statements raise questions, rather than providing answers. Is the ‘now’ what’s important? Why the comparison between feeling grief and playing a game? Though these statements look the same, we understand them as different kinds of speech act: the first is asking about a report about one’s feelings and one’s reaction to events; the second seems like an odd question, since it would seem that the question could only be asked if the questioner and the respondent were not looking at the same thing. The question might be something that one asks while talking on the phone to someone else whom one can’t see.

The first question seems to be about what one can’t see, too, but it seems aimed at something else: feelings that one cannot see, perhaps, or maybe a question prompted by an event that one would assume would prompt grief. The usual reading of Wittgenstein is that he is suspicious of the idea of private sensations or mental representations that elude the publicity of expression, and that are not subject to correction. Can we identify a completely private event, feeling, or image as that of grief? There wouldn’t seem to be any criterion for the correct re-identification of the feeling of grief if grief were an entirely private and unshareable experience. And of course, grief isn’t simply sadness—the German words that Wittgenstein uses are ‘den Kummer’: sorrow or grief. While sadness might just be a feeling, sorrow or grief seem to involve a judgment of some sort.

But asking someone if they are now playing chess? The asking of the question seems to require a special context: any observer ought to be able to tell if I am now playing chess under normal circumstances by just looking at me, the chess board, the chess pieces, the moves I make, and the moves my opponent makes. Only someone not familiar with chess or someone who is not present to see for themselves could ask “aren’t you now playing chess?”

The quote comes from a part of the Investigations that was compiled by Wittgenstein’s literary executors Elizabeth Anscombe and Rush Rhees, who put together the final manuscript for the Investigations after Wittgenstein died. The remarks that come before the one that Rooney uses as an epigram are:

“Grief” describes a pattern which recurs, with different variations, in the weave of our life. If a man’s bodily expression of sorrow and of joy alternated, say, with the ticking of a clock, here we should not have the characteristic formation of the pattern of sorrow or of the pattern of joy.

“For a second he felt a violent pain.”—Why does it sound queer to say: “For a second he felt deep grief”? Only because it so seldom happens?

The remark that comes after what Rooney has included is:

The answer may be affirmative, but that does not make the concept of grief any more like the concept of a sensation.—The question was really, of course, a temporal and personal one, not the logical question which we wanted to raise.

But Wittgenstein is dodgy when it comes to the idea of meaning and games: in most cases meaning is use; when Wittgenstein talks about ‘games’ in the Philosophical Investigations he talks about family resemblances between the things we call games—meaning isn’t dictated by whether the things we call ‘games’ all have some common property. Chess, basketball, solitaire, tennis, hitting a tennis ball against a wall: these are all games, but they don’t seem to share any characteristics except being (roughly) rule-governed. And this is why Wittgenstein talks about language as a game—there are rules that govern languages. Sometimes those rules are very strict, as when a definition is narrowly applied to a term; in ordinary language, those rules might be fuzzier, but there are still rules.

Much of this book is about rule-breaking, and it might be this that Rooney is pointing toward with the Wittgenstein quote. Ivan doesn’t seem to know the rules of social interactions; Margaret, his older lover, is worried what people will think if they know about the relationship between her and Ivan. Peter thinks he knows the rules, but also seems to be thrown by any deviation from them.

But is Rooney citing Wittgenstein’s comparison between feeling grief and playing chess approvingly? Or is the book supposed to be a way of showing the reader what’s wrong with it? The use of an epigram doesn’t tell us whether it’s quoted because the author thinks it’s true, or whether she wants us to see what’s wrong with it. All the reader knows is that the author wants us to read the book with that quote in mind. The rules about epigrams and their role in framing a narrative aren’t very clear.

And then there’s the rather difficult to read passages from Peter: they are staccato, Joycean, streams of Peter’s consciousness—they feel almost like assaults. The opening chapter of the book throws us into this stream, and we see the world as Peter does. He describes his brother Ivan as “Ivan the terrible”; we learn that he thinks that Ivan’s suit is something that probably came from a second-hand clothing store. He wishes that Ivan were more socially skilled, because Peter, as the more socially skilled brother, had to speak at his father’s funeral two weeks ago. We also meet Naomi, the young woman (Ivan’s age) with whom Peter has a very intense sexual relationship. Peter tells Naomi about Ivan who is, he says, a chess genius, maybe autistic—and Peter doesn’t know how Ivan is doing in the wake of their father’s death.

Peter and Ivan are both grieving, we assume. Peter doesn’t say much about it, but Ivan’s reflections (not narrated in the same way as Peter’s) are often about his grief. Ivan grieves for his dog, for his father, for the promise that seemed to be his when he was a teenaged chess prodigy. Peter is also grieving. He is less emotional about his father’s death (he is 10 years older than Ivan), though one still gets the sense that his grief is there, under wraps; he grieves for the relationship he had with Sylvia, the love of his life; he grieves for the relationship he once had with Ivan, whom, Peter remembers, used to look up to him. They have grown apart, and Peter’s attempts to protect his brother and give him advice only drive them farther apart.

Ivan is reunited with his dog, Alexei. In the Investigations Wittgenstein asks why dogs don’t lie, and Alexei is, as Wittgenstein would note, paradigmatically honest. His joy at seeing Ivan and Peter is sincere—he wears his doggy heart on his doggy sleeve, as it were. And he does not seem to think about what is lost—his home with Ivan and Peter’s father; the games of fetch. When Ivan takes him for a walk, passersby admire Alexei, who basks in the attention. Both Ivan and Peter love the dog, and they bestow affection on him. But they don’t seem to be able to show each other that affection—their feelings about each other are more complicated; they think more about how they will be perceived, how they’ve been hurt, and their shared past.

The connection between chess and grief in this book is difficult to capture in a pithy sentence or two, and a paraphrase in terms of the moral of story seems wrong. While chess games have clear rules and winners and losers, love, grief, and conversation have rules that are less clear and one might only know that any rules are in effect by violating those rules. That’s a pretty banal conclusion to draw, I suppose Maybe we already knew this. But Intermezzo shows us how love and grief are patterns which recur, with different variations, in the weave of our life.chess