Do Critics Create?

"Richard Rorty Lays Down the Law" by Leon Surette, in Philosophy and Literature (Oct. 1995), Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, Journals Division, 2715 N. Charles St., Baltimore, Md. 21218–4319.

Among today’s literary critics, philosopher Richard Rorty has many admirers. A selfdescribed "Deweyan pragmatist," he thinks philosophers should abandon not only traditional metaphysics but also the early American pragmatists’ enthusiasm for the natural sciences, and instead adopt literary criticism’s "ironic" and "conversational" practices. While "enormously flattering" to literary critics, argues Surette, a professor of English at the University of Western Ontario, this proposal rests on a "highly selective" notion of literary criticism.

"For centuries," Surette says, "it has been considered a moral duty for criticism to concede dominance and privilege to the object texts—the poems, plays, and novels." This was true, for example, of the so-called New Critics of the mid-20th century, who eschewed virtually all knowledge of the author’s life and times and "prided themselves on being sensitive recording instruments whose readings were" free of "distortions" from outside the text. More traditional critics steeped themselves in the history and culture of the period in which the work was written in order to recover its original sense. In recent decades, however, theorists such as Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault have rejected this modesty and sought to put critical commentary on a par with imaginative creations, and critics on a par with artists. "Rorty buys into this current trend—without, so far as I can make out, much arrière pensée [afterthought]," Surette says.

Literary critics have long seen their work as "the reinterpretation or redescription" of imaginative works, Surette notes. Rorty instead describes literary criticism as "the attempt to play off vocabularies against one another"—with each text and each critic in possession of a separate vocabulary. Rorty is not suggesting that critics "paraphrase the unfamiliar vocabulary of the artist into a familiar vocabulary," Surette writes, because he believes that the sense of a text cannot be separated from its language. He sees the literary critic as a playful ironist, a kind of master of ceremonies. His ability to juggle different vocabularies finally enables him to create his own parallel discourses.

Rorty and the postmodern literary theorists he admires are trying to turn Plato on his head, Surette contends. In Plato’s Ion, Socrates asks Ion, a minstrel who recites epic poetry, "to choose between admitting on the one hand that he was an artist inventing what he only pretended to discover in Homer (and therefore a fraud), or on the other hand that he was out of his mind, possessed by Homer.

"Ion rather lightly chose to be considered out of his mind," Surette writes, "and literary criticism has seconded his choice many times since." Rorty and the current theorists, however, have simply chosen the other horn of Socrates’ dilemma. They insist that the critics are artists, but, at the same time, they say they remain critics, whose works somehow arise from Homer, Dante, or Shakespeare. This having it both ways may not bother postmodernists, but it does worry other sorts of literary critics, Surette notes— and Rorty has not shown them a way out of the dilemma. Instead, Surette warns, the much-admired philosopher is simply trying "to lay down the law" for literature.