Wittgenstein and language-games in narrative structure

Wittgenstein’s concept of language-games illuminates narrative structure by shifting attention from words considered in isolation to language as a rule-governed activity. Questions, promises, jokes, reports and commands make sense within shared practices, with criteria that help speakers judge what they have done. Narrative prose works in a comparable way: openings establish expectations, voices claim authority, and endings settle or frustrate obligations created along the way.

Applied to narrative, this idea reveals structure as more than an arrangement of events. It concerns who may speak, how a reply follows a challenge, what a narrator can know, and when an apparent rule changes. The approach is especially useful for Australian readers, whose encounters with literary culture range from neighbourhood bookshops and festival panels to the country’s journals and scholarly databases.

From words to rules of use

In the Philosophical Investigations, a language-game is not simply a contest with a winner. The term links language to forms of life: acts acquire meaning through use, convention and response. Builders calling out, shopping, teaching and apologising employ different vocabularies and standards, yet each practice can be learned by participating in it. Many rules remain tacit; a fluent speaker knows when a turn has failed without reciting a rulebook.

Read this way, a whodunnit teaches its own protocols through clues, suspicions and changes in evidence. An epistolary novel establishes conventions for letters and omissions, while a stream-of-consciousness narrative permits a different relation between thought and time. Formal innovation becomes legible as a change in the game’s rules, provided the change is tested against the text’s prior practices rather than imposed from outside.

Dialogue as a shared practice

Dialogue offers the clearest case. A question may request information, challenge a claim or secure attention; the same sentence performs different moves under different rules. Turn-taking, address and reply create shared obligations. Narrative can expose these obligations by showing a character who ignores a cue, exploits politeness, or learns that an answer will count as confession.

Christos Tsiolkas’s Barracuda makes this visible across several practices: family conversation, street argument, institutional procedure and the language of court. Set in Melbourne and shaped by the city’s Greek community, the novel shows how switching among idioms also switches among forms of authority. A tram ride or a restaurant exchange can look ordinary while a character uses it to evade, accuse or reposition himself.

Dramatic irony depends on another negotiated practice: the audience may know more than a character and assess a speech against knowledge withheld from that character. The utterance still follows rules, but its significance changes across the novel’s information game. This is why the method illuminates plot and characterisation together.

Narrative forms as language-games

Narration is also a language-game. Description, summary, temporal compression and direct quotation are distinct ways of handling events, each with conventions about evidence and distance. A first-person narrator may be licensed to speculate because the genre has established intimate access; an impersonal narrator may refuse that licence. The resulting structure is a pattern of permitted claims, not a container for an independently formed story.

Thea Astley’s The Scavengers offers a particularly Australian test. Its Queensland setting, fractured chronology and competing voices make readers negotiate several genres at once: social observation, mystery, memory and satire. Each episode supplies a rule for interpreting the next, while the pattern of male violence and female resistance unsettles any expectation that a single narrative voice controls the game.

Second-person address, free indirect style and the unreliable confession likewise establish distinct readerly roles. Their rules become clearest through comparison with what the text has previously allowed. To call a device a language-game is thus more precise than labelling it ambiguous: it directs attention to the practice the device invites readers to perform.

Fiction, context, and ordinary life

The idea of a form of life prevents fictional language-games from becoming arbitrary wordplay. David Malouf’s Johnno, set in Brisbane during the 1950s, gives class, desire and place mutually determining accents. The novel’s Brisbane streets and social crossings are not merely background; they determine which expressions count as improper, intimate or powerful. Narrative form participates in the social world it depicts.

Yet language-games do not make truth relative to whoever happens to be playing. Participants can challenge a misuse, appeal to a shared standard or lose an argument. Literary criticism performs a comparable judgment, asking whether a reading remains answerable to textual practices and to other competent readings. This concern with public criteria links Wittgenstein to Stanley Cavell’s attention to strained speech and to ethical questions about what characters and readers can say in response.

Local scholarly infrastructure makes this comparative work possible. AustLit indexes Australian writing and its reception; Trove, maintained by the National Library of Australia in Canberra, connects books, journals and archives; journals such as Meanjin, Overland and Southerly sustain criticism across Brisbane, Adelaide and Sydney. These resources support conversations extending beyond one canonical text or one metropolitan reading culture.

A close-reading practice for readers

A close reading built around language-games asks what shared activity is underway, who recognises its rules, and what happens when those rules are tested. Four prompts keep the analysis concrete:

• Name the operative practice, such as confession, testimony, gossip or instruction.
• Mark the point where the text teaches an unwritten rule to its readers.
• Track a change in permitted speech across narrators, scenes or chapters.
• Compare two moments that perform the same kind of move in different ways.

Research on the passage then needs four checks against overreading:

• Anchor every claim in a specific lexical, structural or contextual detail.
• Distinguish rules shared by characters from rules governing the narration.
• Test an interpretation against passages that might resist it.
• Compare how a critic, editor or adapter accounts for the same textual problem.

Turn interpretation into inquiry

This method can travel from the seminar room to a conference paper or public lecture. At a Sydney Writers’ Festival panel, for example, critics can ask whether a speaker’s account of a novel treats interpretation as rule-governed inquiry or as private preference. The vocabulary connects literary argument to ordinary-language philosophy without reducing aesthetic value to philosophical paraphrase.

For readers beginning such a project, the OLP resource index offers a route into relevant books, articles and archival material on Wittgenstein, Cavell and literary criticism. Choose one short scene, identify its principal speech practices, test one rule-breaking moment, and publish the resulting interpretation as a contribution to a wider scholarly conversation.