Like a Prayer

The title of Sally Rooney’s fourth novel, Intermezzo, refers to a move in chess, more commonly known as a Zwischenzug, in which a player delays a favourable move, such as the capture of a piece, in order to obtain an extra advantage in position. Scattered throughout are quotations from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. The first is to be found in the epigraph: ‘But don’t you feel grief now? (“But aren’t you now playing chess?”)’ In context, Wittgenstein is analysing the grammar of expressing sensations of pain and painful emotions, and their respective relation to temporal duration. The later Wittgenstein conceived of language as a network of games: a series of rule-governed activities, or moves, which acquire meaning through their use in the social situations he called ‘forms of life’. The language-games he considered were relatively simple – the game of naming objects, the game of counting, the game of requesting information, the game of expressing inner states, and so on – but chess – whose two sets of pieces are coded hierarchically according to function and value, move in delimited ways through delimited terrain, and are animated by conflict – provides a handy model for a certain way of conceiving of social relations. That is no doubt why chess has also proven to be an attractive metaphor for those who specialize in that more complex language-game of representing forms of life known as the novel.