“The Limits of Jack’s World”

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein summed up his conclusions about the relationship between language and the world in an oft-cited aphorism: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” The implications of this statement are profound: Wittgenstein is not quite saying that “all we have is language,” that there “is no objective reality” apart from language, but he does insist that we have no meaningful experience of the world without the language in which to conceive and express that experience. Our reality is shaped by our language, and not the other way around. “Objective reality” is not something we have unmediated access to, and so to that extent it does not meaningfully exist. Our picture of reality is entirely determined—and limited—by our capacity to say (or think) something coherent about and within it. “The world,” in this formulation, is not a material thing or place “out there” but rather a reflection and projection of our language itself. Elsewhere in the same volume, Wittgenstein observes, “The world is everything that is the case”—when we say “the world,” we basically mean “everything it makes sense to say.”

Learning a language means learning a world. And watching a child learn language is a powerful illustration of this concept in practice—you can see as they file new information, new words and concepts, into their already existing picture of the world. A new word or concept needs to fit somehow, and that “somehow” is grammatical. When I learn that the earth revolves around the sun, a picture of the universe and my place within it takes hold. If I were living before Copernicus, I would have inherited a different picture of the cosmos, and different sentences would make sense to me: my language would be in many ways incompatible with the language I now speak. A whole bunch of statements that would be true and reasonable in my language would make me sound ignorant, superstitious, or even blasphemous in a pre-Copernican context. I haven’t gone out and independently investigated and confirmed the orbit of the earth around the sun; it simply makes grammatical sense within my inherited language to talk this way. Statements about the earth’s movements are “held in place” by the larger linguistic context within which these statements make sense. This is true for everything we know. Our minds are circumscribed to a profound degree by our language.

In Room, by creating a narrative voice for Jack and engaging us intimately with his point of view as he tries to make sense of his profoundly circumscribed world, Donoghue illustrates Wittgenstein’s insights into the nature of language and our perception and experience of reality. We surmise, from the earliest pages, that Jack’s strange way of speaking is an accurate reflection of the reality he is forced to inhabit. He doesn’t feel constrained by the narrow dimensions of Room because he doesn’t know anything else. Jack’s “Room” seems to require only a limited number of words—the objects he needs nouns for are much more limited than for the average child. Jack has no need for generic nouns (a bed, a stove, a thermostat—or a mother, for that matter). So instead his world is populated by proper nouns: Bed, Door, Thermostat, Ma, and so on. These are literally one of a kind for him, as simply explaining that there are other doors of which “Door” is but one example would require explaining a lot to Jack, and Ma hasn’t been up to the task. He can see that doors are represented on TV, and that these resemble his Door in their form and operations, but this is explained by his dichotomy of “real” versus “TV”—TV represents another “planet,” another “world,” and his world has only one Door.

Ma is doing a heroic job of attempting to educate Jack, to exercise his mind and to teach him to read and do math and to learn things about science. And when it comes to language, the endeavor is full of dangerous territory. Jack’s world is profoundly, artificially, and criminally limited by Old Nick—but it’s crucial to grasp that Jack doesn’t experience it as such. His language makes his experience of Room incredibly rich; as we’ve talked about in class, it’s the setting for all these fun games Ma has invented, it’s populated by furniture and items that reflect his personal history (and he knows these stories by heart), and which Ma has “personified” by giving them proper names and genders. But the process of learning language, as anyone who has spent time around five-year-olds can attest, means asking a lot of questions, usually questions about what is real and what isn’t, and how one thing relates to another. Kids at this age have this insatiable hunger to learn about their world, and it’s no coincidence that this is the point at which their linguistic capacity has developed to the extent that they can frame such questions independently: a certain “bedrock” needs to be established before questions can even be formed. This is precisely the dilemma Ma faces as the novel opens—we can see that it’s becoming more and more difficult for her to maintain the bedrock fiction of “Room” as the entire universe in an 11x11 space. Jack’s questions, the new words and concepts he’s constantly learning, inevitably bump him up against the limits of his world. Jack’s language seems to be starting to outgrow his narrowly circumscribed world. Or, to stick with Wittgenstein’s formulation, as his language expands, his world inevitably does, too. And Ma will need to find a way to deal with this.

In the scenes before Ma decides to finally tell Jack her “story”—to “unlie” and strip him of his innocence—we repeatedly see how Jack’s questions press against the limits of what Ma is willing to tell him. She’s beginning to see that he cannot fully learn language without requiring her to explain a whole host of things that she has tried to keep him innocent of. When they measure Jack’s height on his fifth birthday, Ma remarks that it’s “normal” for him not to have grown more than an inch or two over the previous year (even as she’s clearly worried that it’s not normal, and that Jack’s development is stunted). Jack asks,  “What’s normal?” (13). He’s not asking what would have been a more typical amount of growth in a year, and he is not intending to make some broader point here about diversity (What is “normal,” after all? Aren’t we all unique individuals?); he simply does not know what the word “normal” means. Now how would you define it for Jack? Ma “chews her mouth” as she tries to find a way out of this corner. “It means OK. No hay problema.” Jack accepts this explanation and moves on, but we get a glimpse here of the minefield Ma must step through with even the most ordinary (or normal) words: not only is nothing about Jack’s growth and development “normal” (hay problema, in other words), but even trying to explain the concept of normativity, of Jack’s growth being more or less in line with how kids “typically” grow, would mean introducing him to the idea of a vast mass of other kids out there in the world, against whom he can be measured. His picture of the world would be altered. Ma can’t really define the word without sharing the picture of the world (that it is inhabited by billions of other people, and that we can generalize about the way they grow up) that it reflects. Jack’s world is limited by his language.

Later in the same scene, Jack says that he wants to “grow to a giant, but a nice one, up to here” (13), and Ma replies, “Sounds great,” but Jack notices that “Her face is gone flat, that means I said a wrong thing but I don’t know which” (14). What has Jack said “wrong” here? Well, he seems to believe that sometime around when he turns ten he’ll transform into a woman and have a baby boy growing in his belly—his mother has had to resort to more than the usual prevarications parents use to avoid answering tough questions about where babies come from. But it’s clear to us that Ma is hanging up on Jack’s simple claim about what he wants to be when he “grows [up]”—he hasn’t said anything wrong, and he is learning what phrases like “grow up” mean and that this will happen to him in some form. But for Ma this phrase calls up a world of trouble Jack is not privy to: what will he be when he “grows”? How much longer can this situation persist? Jack’s familiar and amiable fantasy about wanting to grow into a “giant” (kids say stuff like this all the time) evokes near panic in Ma, one that’s growing throughout these early pages, as she sees his language starting to expand beyond the walls of Room.

The game of Parrot, where Jack has to memorize a string of spoken words from the TV and repeat them verbatim, is a brilliant way to exercise his mind and develop his vocabulary—one more example of Ma’s heroic improvisational skills as a parent and educator. But this also provides an exceptionally risky venture, in terms of maintaining Jack’s limited language to reflect his limited world: Jack misconstrues “labor law” as “labeling” when he repeats a phrase from a guest on a political talk show. Ma corrects him, like a good teacher, and when he asks “What’s the difference?” she makes an effort to answer. “Labeling is stickers on tomatoes, say, and labor law—” (35). Where can she go from here? How would you define “labor law” in a way Jack could understand? Ma is visibly relieved when Jack lets her off the hook with his “huge yawn” (really, no five-year-old actually wants an adult to explain labor law). But again, we see how impossible the fiction of Room will be for Ma to maintain.

To her credit, Ma does not allow Jack’s world to stay limited by Room’s four walls. She could have done so, perhaps—banishing TV entirely, and sticking to the fiction that they are the only two “real” people in the universe, with Old Nick occupying a position somewhere between God and jailer (or Santa and Satan). But Ma wants to educate her son, to raise him to be a “human,” intelligent and self-aware and maybe even “normal,” and we’ll see, in “Dying,” how relieved she is to finally abandon the ruse and let him in on her secrets. She now has a co-conspirator, and Jack’s intelligence will be vital to their escape plan. Jack is devastated when his picture of his tiny world is suddenly blown wide open, but he’s better equipped to handle it because Ma has educated him so well. He has an exceptional vocabulary for a boy his age, and in his circumstances, and this means that he can accommodate all this new space, all these new people.