In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Subjunctive Time: Henry James’s Possible Wars
  • Wai Chee Dimock (bio)

“Whatever we see could be other than it is,” and “whatever we can describe at all could be other than it is,” Wittgenstein writes in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (58). Wittgenstein is speaking here of a world that he refers to as a “limited whole.” It is the world that we call “empirical”—the one that is manifest to us, that can be documented or demonstrated, and that appears to be the only world there is. This apparent totality is deceptive, Wittgenstein says, for the empirical world is actually no more than a fraction, a subset, however self-contained, of a much larger universe. That larger universe includes not only phenomena that have taken visible form but also phenomena that have not: a world resting just below the threshold of actualization, made up of could-have-beens and could-still-bes. These counterfactuals are, by our common parlance, non-events. They are not considered part of history. Yet not only are they real alternatives—cousins or even siblings to the real events—they are often comparable to the latter in their degree of likelihood, their probability of occurrence. There is no logical reason why they should not have happened and, had they done so, what is now called “otherwise” would have been no more and no less than the real thing. The stark antithesis between the two is a semantic distinction, indeed a fluke. It is a happenstance, a tightening of the causal net in one direction rather than another, one that, often for no good reason, drastically thins out the range of available options, reducing a multitudinous world to a few hard facts.

Wittgenstein highlights just this random narrowing of a once-populous field. He reminds us that what prevails as reality often does so haphazardly, at the expense of a much larger pool that has no compelling reason for not staying large. “All that happens [End Page 242] and is the case is accidental,” he writes (71). Materialization is chancy, shaky, a toss-up until the last moment. It is often a matter of luck, rather than a matter of logic, that a volatile field should congeal at just this point, precipitating this outcome rather than that. Any event that solidifies is haunted by many others, not so fortunate, that once were and that might still be eligible candidates. Since this is the case, an empirical description of the world is not only fractional, but arbitrary in what it leaves out—arbitrary, down to the sentences that it allows us to think or say. Wittgenstein writes: “Empirical reality is limited by the totality of objects. The limit also makes itself manifest in the totality of elementary propositions” (56).

By “elementary propositions,” Wittgenstein seems to have in mind only indicative sentences. To the extent that these sentences are the propositional forms of the empirical world, they are indeed “elementary”—in the sense of being barebones, skeletal, a thin outline rather than a thick description, not unlike (as Wittgenstein might also say) a “square mesh” (67) imposed upon irregular shapes, blocking out crucial features even as it produces regularity. Indicative sentences are powerful filters, so powerful that the world they describe would seem to be an effect of that descriptive procedure, one that licenses some events and debars others, consigning these to a premature and perhaps unjustified oblivion. Fortunately, they are not the only sentences in circulation. The English grammar (like the German grammar) has a much richer repertoire.

The subjunctive, for instance, is only loosely, or perhaps even nominally, bound by empirical reality. Its allegiance is to a ghostly region, a kind of syntactic underground, hovering just below the threshold of actualization, casting its shadow on the known world, turning sharp bright lines into a dense thicket, at once insubstantial and impenetrable, a vectorial field not yet hardened or pruned. A still-undecided past and a still-hypothetical future are housed by this syntactic form: counterfactual, not often accredited, but available all the same as virtual sites, thinkable versions of the world. The very presence of this grammatical mood suggests that pre-histories and post-histories are more...

pdf

Share