‘Clear’ by Carys Davies: winning the language-game

Nothing much happens in Clear (2024), Carys Davies’s second novel to have won Wales Book of the Year.¹ Ivar lives on a remote Scottish island, perhaps closer to Norway than mainland Scotland, and tends to his cow, his horse, and to the land.

In nineteenth century Scotland, John Ferguson is sent to invite him to leave. He falls down a cliff, and Ivar rescues him. They co-habit for a few weeks and learn to translate each other’s vernacular so as to communicate. They also begin an amorous homosexual relationship.

This queer narrative is trumped by the novel’s key revelation—more on which below—which is as surprising as it is muted.

Nothing much happens in Clear. And yet somehow it still resonates with readers and prize judges alike.

In overcoming questions about difficulties with untranslatable language, Clear also shows readers how private languages can become shared.

Communication

If you’re reading a novel, it goes without saying that you understand the value of language and communication.²

In Clear, this comes in moments of revelation. It happens two clear ways.

First, Ivar comes to realise that his rare, Norn language is populated by words. This shakes him out of his daily living, defamiliarising him. As with Viktor Shklovsky’s ostranenie,³ the words become wordy for Ivar. Until now, ‘he’d never really thought of the things he saw or heard or touched or felt as words’.⁴

John Ferguson has a similar revelation—a word I choose advisedly—in recounting his translation into Scots of the King James Version of the Bible. He had discovered a kind of passion in finding just the right word.

John Ferguson equates the project with the compilation of the glossary of Norn that he is writing while staying on the island. The satisfaction comes from finding ‘all the accuracy and precision you could muster’ (Davies, p. 88).

In both cases, we can classify these moments of opaque wordiness—the recognition that words exist and have an almost material effect—as the attempt at and hope for communication.

Language-games

In his 1953 work Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein spent a great deal of time arguing about how humans communicate. He came up with a term, ‘language-games’, to emphasise that how humans communicate is not a matter of abstract philosophical thought, but something that is part of real life: ‘[T]he term “language-game” is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life’.⁵

Put another way, ‘the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven, [is called] the “language-game”‘ (Wittgenstein, 5e).

By this argument, Clear‘s John Ferguson is adept at thinking through the fact of the language-game, because his translation of the Bible into Scots is overtly concerned with language as action.

By contrast, Ivar’s privatised Norn, even when documented by John Ferguson, resists becoming anything other than a private language. Wittgenstein found this particular kind of instance a threat to language-games because a private language doesn’t take proper part in the world:

We could even imagine human beings who spoke only in monologue; who accompanied their activities by talking to themselves. —An explorer who watched them and listened to their talk might succeed in translating their language into ours. (This would enable him to predict these people’s actions correctly, for he also hears them making resolutions and decisions.)

But could we also imagine a language in which a person could write down or give vocal expression to his inner experiences—his feelings,
moods, and the rest—for his private use?-Well, can’t we do so
in our ordinary language?—But that is not what I mean. The individual words of this language are to refer to what can only be known to the person speaking; to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language. (Wittgenstein, 243)

Here is Ivar, speaking in monologue; and here is John Ferguson, a quasi-explorer, writing down Ivar’s language and translating it into his own.

Nevertheless, for Wittgenstein, Ivar’s speech never enters the full form of life of a language-game—it remains private.

The third: a revelation

That isn’t to say that John Ferguson doesn’t learn to communicate with Ivar. Far from it. Not only does John haltingly speak Norn, but he also learns to communicate through his body, sexually. At first they dance together and then, in the next scene, the reader is presented with an allusive image of the two men under a blanket.

However, Wittgenstein’s implication is that true communication requires a third person to witness the language at work. This could turn it from some nonsense that two clowns might talk about by the side of a road,⁶ into a conversation in which history can take place for and because of the witness.

John Ferguson’s wife, Mary, does precisely that. When she arrives at the island, and even though ‘It was as if the three of them had forgotten how to speak’, she still comprehends quickly that ‘She could never say how she knew’ about her husband’s infidelity with and love for Ivar, ‘but she did. It was in John and in the man’ (Davies, pp. 139. 141).

And, in the novel’s key revelation, she tells her husband, ‘”Instead of two, we could be three.”‘ (Davies, p. 144).

Let the language-game begin.

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1. The first was West (2018). ↩︎
2. This is my second consecutive blog post on the topic of language. See my post on Percival Everett’s James for some different considerations. ↩︎
3. Viktor Shklovsky defines ‘defamiliarisation’, ostranenie, as a writer ‘making the stone stony’. See Viktor Shklovsky (2012 [1917]), ‘Art as Technique’, in From Symbolism to Socialist Realism, ed. by I. Masing-Delic (Brighton: Academic Studies Press), pp. 64–81. ↩︎
4. Carys Davies, Clear (London: Granta, 2025), p. 73. ↩︎
5. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1958 [1953]), 11e. ↩︎
6. I am referring here to the plot of Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot (1952). ↩︎