bartczak-richard rorty and the ironic plenitude of literature

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/18758185-01201004

contemporary pragmatism 12 (2015) 59-78

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Richard Rorty and the Ironic Plenitude of Literature

Kacper BartczakDepartment of American Literature, University of Lodz, Poland

[email protected]

Abstract

When considered in relation to remarks in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rortian irony becomes a target of criticisms that see it as marred by the conflict between skep-tical distance and commitment. But such critique ignores the fact that Rortian irony belongs to a broader literary intuition. In this article I trace Rorty’s concept of irony to the structural properties of a specific group of literary texts. These texts bring together diverse materials the affinity between which is precisely what is at stake in the inter-pretive game these texts put in motion: the formal, cognitive, and aesthetic coherence of these texts is a potentiality to be realized by readers. I treat the interpretive activity these texts depend on as equivalent to the practices by which inhabitants of democra-cies reexamine and recompose the materials of their networks of beliefs. Since such practices require a combination of ironic distance to the examined materials with a commitment to the interpretive process itself, they validate a Rortian model of irony.

Keywords

Rorty – irony – interpretation – novel – poetry

1 Introduction

Among the most common charges made against Rorty’s idea of irony is the accu-sation of it being cynicism in disguise. Here is an example of such a critique:

The ironist will be rather like the woman without faith among religious believers – she may go through the motions, mouth the same slogans,

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1 John Horton, “Irony and Commitment: Irreducible Dualism,” in Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues, ed. Matthew Festenstein and Simon Thompson (Cambridge, uk: Polity, 2001), pp. 26–27.

2 Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts (New York: Harper, 1995), p. 9.

observe the same ritual, but these cannot really unite her with the true believers.1

Let us contrast this representative critique with a testimony by an ironist. Here is Milan Kundera commenting on the intricacies of his political and atheist identity:

I was raised an atheist and that suited me until the day when, in the dark-est years of Communism, I saw Christians being bullied. On the instant, the provocative, zestful atheism of my early youth vanished like some juvenile brainlessness. I understood my believing friends and, carried away by solidarity and by emotion, I sometimes went along with them to mass. Still, I never arrived at the conviction that a God existed as a being that directs our destinies…. I was sitting in church with the strange and happy sensation that my nonbelief and their belief were oddly close.2

This memory is part of a prolonged commentary on the relations between lit-erature, history, philosophy, and the intricacies through which one’s debt to these fields makes up one’s biography. Seemingly paradoxical, Kundera’s posi-tion will be more readily accessible to those who understand the changing roles the Catholic Church played in Eastern European societies under the rule of the communist regimes and after their collapse. How this complex position was enabled by literary experience becomes apparent when we recall that Kundera’s atheist narrator’s joining the rituals of religious believers was a result of a complex interpretive activity. Kundera’s stance on a particular juncture of history, politics, and biography – a stance that is both ironic and non-cynical – is inseparable from his life of a writer and avid reader of literature.

So is Rorty’s concept of irony. Richard Rorty’s works provide scattered remarks on widely understood literary experience. In his irregular discussions of selected literary works and occasional debates with literary critics and theo-reticians, Rorty has provided a series of intuitions on how literature may be conducive to the causes of democracy and the project of self-creation. Included in his thinking about the links between literature, self-making, autonomy, and the condition of democracy is Rorty’s unique treatment of the concept of irony. With its related portrait of the liberal-ironist, it is perhaps the most contested

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3 Michael Williams, “Rorty on Knowledge and Truth,” in Richard Rorty, ed. Charles Guignon and David R. Hiley (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 61–80.

and debated among his proposals. Generally, the project of Rortian irony is mis-trusted as unfeasible. Most of the critiques point to the contradictions atten-dant on the portrayal of the ironist’s life. But these tensions are a result of a too narrow treatment of the term, presenting it as if it were a purely philosophical, sociological, or political concept and ignoring its literary provenance.

I believe this is a mistake. Irony has an unavoidable literary genealogy and Rorty’s ironism has two main roots: his unique approach to the classical prag-matist tradition and his intuitions on literature, particularly the novel. In this article I shall defend Rorty’s concept of irony as a way of life that is not only feasible, but also conducive to the causes of democracies. We obtain a more comprehensive view of how Rorty’s irony might work as a real life option, when we discuss it in relation to a specific kind of literary experience. The experience I have in mind is of interacting with complex literary texts that presuppose an ongoing interpretive activity as an integral element of their structure. Here, the literary text is a hypothesis of relations between stances that might not be readily compatible on ethical, cognitive, or aesthetic grounds. And yet, the text as a formal passage is a way of accounting for how such stances might be readable when found in close vicinity of one another. The text is an artificial environment that might reveal unexpected sides of attitudes we thought of as fully known, as these attitudes are brought together with other attitudes in an unexpected relational system. The literary texts I have in mind are such relational systems.

Rorty seems to have found this experience mainly in some novels. Here, I will try to show how it is also an integral part of some American poems. I will show a variety of irony – an evolved version of Rortian irony – to be a constitu-tive feature of such a class of literary texts. I will show how some literary cre-ations, both novels and poems, sustain themselves as hypothetically coherent wholes by installing self-interpretive activities in which irony becomes a form of commitment. In so doing these literary forms complement and develop Rorty’s intuitions on how irony might work for the sake of democratic communities.

2 The Critics of Rortian Irony

Rorty’s concept of irony has caused considerable unrest among his commen-tators. Michael Williams, for example, has seen in it a rather distorted and misguided copy of Hume’s radical skepticism.3 Other critics dismiss Rorty’s

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4 Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Don’t Be Cruel: Reflections on Rortyian Liberalism,” in Richard Rorty, ed. Charles Guignon and David R. Hiley (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 150.

5 Horton, “Irony and Commitment,” p. 27.6 Ibid., 24.7 Williams, “Rorty on Knowledge and Truth,” p. 75.8 Horton, “Irony and Commitment,” p. 26.9 Ibid., 27.

general anti-foundationalism and the contingency he traces in shaping the individual’s moral character.4 Whatever their stance on Rorty’s theory of redescribability, a vast majority of critics see the ironist’s capability for commitment to any cause in general, and to the cause of liberal democracy in particular, as extremely problematic. For John Horton, for instance, authen-tic moral or political character does not grow on the loose soils of Rorty’s customary anti-foundationalism. Rorty’s world, ruled by the ever present possibility of redescription, is not the right environment for the develop-ment of genuine commitments in morality and politics: “we retain… a sense of moral and political commitment which rests on a very different picture of our relation to the world. This view requires those commitments to be some-thing other than the contingent products of a combination of choice or circumstance.”5

Coming at Rorty’s ironism from different angles, Williams and Horton agree on the basic flaw of this model which they find in Rorty’s attempt to keep the private self-creation separate from the ironist self-creator’s ability to commit to public and political matters. Echoing multiple other critiques, Williams and Horton see the division as murky and hard to maintain. Pointing to the neces-sarily public character of literary creations, Horton claims that the private is simply hard to identify.6 Indicating how the Rortian ironist has no recourse to the commonsensical Humean insulation of everyday practicality from the purely philosophical rumination conducted in the philosopher’s private study, Williams denies the Rortian ironist-cum-skeptic the ability to commit to lib-eral hope: “What keeps the skeptical irony securely private? Why doesn’t such skepticism lead to cynicism, to a lack of commitment? Why doesn’t private irony undermine liberal hope?”7 In similar vein, Horton complains: “It is quite unclear how the ironist can keep her detachment for private values and really commit herself to liberal values in public.”8 Horton’s critique points to the same danger as Williams’s: “Indeed cynicism must be the abiding temptation for the ironist.”9 Both critics see irony as a corrosive substance that seeps through all divides, turning the ironist inevitably into a cynic.



10 Williams, “Rorty on Knowledge and Truth,” p. 74.11 Horton, “Irony and Commitment,” p. 20.

Behind these critiques lies a basic discrepancy concerning the understand-ing of the term. Rorty’s critics treat irony as a strongly incapacitating form of skepticism. If commitment to any cause needs the fuel of belief, irony is pre-cisely the thing that causes the fuel to evaporate. Michael Williams takes this criticism to its very perceptive and logical end and points out that it is not only the public engagements of the ironist that suffer. If irony is radical skepticism, the area of the private self-creation will be vitally touched too. After all, as Williams reminds us, private self-creation is also a project, a hope oriented stance that requires the backing of belief and commitment: “the study [of the self-creator] is no longer a place for glum, passive reflection… but a place for active deliberation, for comparing and evaluating different kinds of lives.”10

I think that Williams is correct – self-creation requires an active stance toward the world, a stance found in Emerson, James, and Dewey. If Rorty’s phi-losophy of self-creation and social hope is to be credited with any efficacy at all, we would need to show how what he calls “irony” is different from incapaci-tating skepticism, a detachment that would be equally destructive in the fields of politics, morality, and self-creation. Thus, my intention to discuss Rorty’s irony in the context of a specific class of literary texts stems from the convic-tion that these texts – following Rorty’s accurate intuitions – base their very being as stable literary objects on a complex activity of turning irony into a form of commitment. Rorty’s notion of irony cannot be discussed through a limited recourse to a closed set of fragments in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, in which his critics see the ironist as an almost neurotic figure, too preoccupied with the “worry” concerning her very identity.11 By pointing to some formal continuities between the literary works on which Rorty com-ments, and other works which enhance the formal features in question, we will see how all these works, when treated as hypothetical interpretive wholes, dis-play complex self-reflexive commitment to their own interpretive action of looking for their shape. We will see how these texts are equivalent to a complex type of personhood in which irony is a form of commitment to its balance. I am claiming that certain texts – especially a class of poems – might be treated as artificial person-like entities. They hold together as separate from other such entities, while participating in excessive linguistic environments. These poems absorb diverse linguistic material but are able to hold it together in a system of aesthetic exchange. Such a system – equal to the value of the text as an artistic object – is an accounting, however paradoxical or surprising, for a coexistence of potentially remote stances implied by the language that the poem absorbs.

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12 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 98–107.

The irony I am going to talk about is what allows us to treat these poems as individual pieces, without recourse to the idea of aesthetic or cognitive coher-ence as closure.

Thus, these poems imitate the complex ways in which individuals, members of contemporary waning democracies, are faced with a necessity of daily com-ing to terms with highly divergent, not readily congruent, reports of the exter-nal world. The cognitively and aesthetically diverse materials that these poems process are equivalent to the multifarious world descriptions that individuals must sort out. The writing/reading process of such poems sheds light on the individuals’ commitment to such sorting out. While this commitment is indis-pensable to these individuals’ mental hygiene, it also goes hand in hand with the ironic distance toward the processed materials. Ultimately, then, I will also try to suggest in what way this sort of paradoxical ironic commitment might be supportive of the causes of a democracy.

3 Irony, Self-creation, and Commitment within the Literary Culture

Rorty’s thinking about irony is inseparable from his concept of autonomy found through literature – as writer or reader. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity literature is the activity that allows the self to reach for the defining good of ironic self-creation: the construction of one’s own vocabulary which will successfully redescribe the vocabularies and contingencies which were responsible for one’s socialization. The figure that epitomizes this ability is Proust.12

In later texts, especially in a piece called “Redemption from Egotism,” Rorty is consistent with his earlier understanding of the novel, which he shares with Milan Kundera. While philosophy tried to produce accurate descriptions of the world, the novel makes us more at home in the pluralistic world by giving us a dynamic environment where values and descriptions keep competing against one another. The key gain of the novel lies in portraying this competi-tion as an interpretive activity that proceeds without recourse to any general key words that would govern the play without being part of it. For Kundera, the novel enters the stage at the twilight of the Middle Ages:

As God slowly departed from the seat whence he had directed the uni-verse and its order of values… Don Quixote set forth from his house into



13 Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel (New York: Harper, 1993), p. 6.14 Richard Rorty, “Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens,” in Essays on Heidegger and Others:

Philosophical Papers, volume 2 (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge up, 1991), p. 75.15 William James, Pragmatism, in Writings 1902–1910 (New York: Library of America, 1987),

p. 510.16 For a full discussion of the connections between William’s pragmatism and Henry’s

theory of the novel, see Jonathan Levine, The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism and American Literary Modernism (Durham: Duke up, 1999), pp. 9–10.

17 Richard Rorty, “The Pragmatist’s Progress: Umberto Eco on Interpretation,” in Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin Books, 1999), p. 145.

a world he could no longer recognize. In the absence of the Supreme Judge, the world suddenly appeared in its fearsome ambiguity.13

For Rorty this means that the novel is “roughly synonymous with ‘the demo-cratic utopia’ – with an imaginary future society in which nobody dreams of thinking that God, or the Truth, or the Nature of Things, is on their side.”14 If the novel instigates free exploratory movement between multiple perspec-tives, this idea is not far from pragmatism’s founding metaphor offered by James in his “corridor theory,” likening pragmatism to a corridor that provides passage among rooms whose residents hold contradictory views.15 To be a pragmatist, on this view, is to stay faithful to the passage – not get locked in any of the rooms. It is a rich passage whose only limitation is in the question of where to stop weaving the description (of a character, an event, etc.), as William James’ sibling, Henry, realized better than his brother and went on to redefine the modern novel.16

But immersion in plurality is conducted in non-skeptical moods. James’s vision of plurality in A Pluralistic Universe is compatible with his earlier idea of the “will to believe,” in which belief is a form of commitment to active co-cre-ation of the world. Rorty subscribes to this position. Participation in the liter-ary culture, whether as writer or reader, is a form of commitment to the process in which the self will be changed. The reader’s self is a text to be meshed with the text of a literary work in the hope of both of them receiving new meanings. Reading is “an encounter… which has made a difference to the [reader’s] con-ception of who she is.”17

Autonomy is the result of this process. It is the ability to keep the idea of integrity in play when making one’s way among the plurality of perspec-tives. In “Philosophy as a Transitional Genre” Rorty states: “It is essential to have glimpsed one or more alternatives to the purposes that most people take for granted, and to have chosen among these alternatives – thereby in some

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18 Richard Rorty, “Philosophy as a Transitional Genre,” in Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Volume 4 (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge up, 2007), p. 90.

19 Richard Rorty, “Redemption from Egotism,” in The Rorty Reader, ed. Christopher J. Voparil and Richard J. Bernstein (Oxford, uk.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 391.

20 Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 214.

21 Ibid., 218.

measure creating oneself.”18 Basically, autonomy has a lot to do with the liter-ary problem of spotting coherence of the tale where there seems to be none. In “Redemption from Egotism” authenticity becomes synonymous with a skill of coherently accommodating new stimuli and data:

all writing that is not merely a matter of conveying information offers… a context in which to put many propositions we have previously believed, many of the people we have known, many parts of our own life-stories, and many of the books we have previously read.19

Such recontextualization is itself a form of commitment, because one cannot develop a skill without being committed to the possible results of its uses in social contexts; here, the result is meaningful interaction with various, perhaps remote, self- or world-descriptions without losing a sense of one’s own stable passage in their midst. We can now see what Rorty’s irony most definitely is not – it is not, for example, Paul de Man’s “absolute irony.” In his modification of the Romantic irony of Friedrich Schlegel, de Man treats literature as lan-guage brought to a hyper-active state of self-commentary in which all achieved understanding is immediately dispersed. De Man’s “absolute irony” is a vertigi-nous falling away from the world, based on a division of language into two spheres: the empirical engagements of language and their postulated continu-ous transcendence. At each stage the self needs to get a distance from the lan-guages in which it has seen itself exist: “The ironic, twofold self that the writer or philosopher constitutes by his language… come[s] into being only at the expense of his empirical self, falling… into the knowledge of his mystifica-tion.”20 Consequently, “far from being a return to the world, the… ‘irony of irony’… stat[es] the continued impossibility of reconciling the world of fiction with the actual world.”21

Rorty’s “autonomy” is different. It is not obtained, as in de Man, through freedom from descriptions, but through novel distributions of descriptions, all of them remaining “empirical” – i.e. usable, none of them being a “mystifica-tion,” there being no other chance for authenticity than through language. This



22 Rorty, “Redemption from Egotism,” p. 405.23 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 100.24 Ibid., p. 102.25 The idea of the author as a hypothetical subjectivity posited by the text conceived of as

an action has been developed by Alexander Nehamas. See Alexander Nehamas, “Writer, Text, Work, Author,” in Literature and the Question of Philosophy, ed. Anthony Cascardi (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 267–91.

autonomy is a commitment to a future shape of the self ’s coherence, a coher-ence to be. For Rorty reading as re-contextualization of the self is generative of selves-as-plots. Reading involves:

the hope that [the reader] will be able someday to see her life… as a work of art – that she will someday be able to look back and bring everything together into some sort of pattern…. It is the hope for rounded comple-tion and self-recognition, and is more like a longing for shapeliness than like the ambition of transcendence.22

4 The Ironic Plenitude of the Novel: Rorty on Proust, Nabokov, and Orwell

One way in which the novels that Rorty found interesting participate in our world is by addressing the issue of the unity of this world. The world is plural – but it seems to hang together, just as some novels seem to remain wholes while consisting of constellations of disparate elements. Some novels seem to be especially intent on taunting the reader with the question of their coherence. What exactly is the principle that keeps Remembrance of Things Past one liter-ary work? According to Rorty, the novel achieves unity by ignoring the question of a unifying pattern and affirming the trust of the narrator in achieving con-struction through immersion in the free flow of contingencies: “Proust’s novel is a network of small, interanimating contingencies.”23 It is a text which places itself within the horizontally non-hierarchical order of events, their strung up character, and speaks from inside their contingent, accidental sequences.

And yet, the novel as an imitation of our own world’s lack of pattern does lead to the creation of a self: “He had written a book and thus created a self – the author of that book.”24 Again – what is the degree to which such a self is a coherent being? The author that Rorty speaks about is a textual hypothesis, a creation of the text that remains as open as the play of contingencies that the novel consists of.25 This author lives with and in the text, and is not an external

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26 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 103.27 Ibid., pp. 100–01.28 Richard Rorty, introduction to Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (London: Everman’s Library,

1962), pp. vii–xix.29 Alexander Nehamas, “What Should We Expect From Reading?”, Salmagundi 111 (Summer

1996): pp. 27–58.

“authority” on it: “it enabled him to shrug off the whole idea of affiliation with a superior power…. He managed to debunk authority without setting himself up as authority.”26

The novel proposes a coherent unity, but it is a unity as a hypothesis. It is always in question – always recuperated by new interpretive acts, the same acts that the self of a finite human being must perform in order to revise its own coherence. Rorty thinks of the novel as a response to the challenge of the shifts in situational parameters and contexts which confront our selves with the ever renewed question of our identity. The unity of the author created by the text of this novel is a dynamic ironic unity: “contingencies… make a differ-ent sense every time redescription occurs.”27 Similarly, the unity of a self, nested in the changing contexts of real life, is created by the “text” of this self ’s ongoing process of reinterpretation.

The question of the identity and unity of the novel as work is a more pro-nounced problem in Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Here the novel proclaims a wide dis-parity of its materials. It consists of a mock academic preface, a long narrative poem in a slightly archaic form of the heroic couplet entitled “Pale Fire,” authored by a John Shade who is a character in the novel Pale Fire, and a madly digressive, if not entirely disconnected, “commentary” on the poem by the author of the preface, another character in Pale Fire – an émigré scholar Charles Kinbote. The relation between those three texts and their fictitious authors is an elusive puzzle. In his reading of the novel, Rorty concentrates mostly on the degree to which the relation between Kinbote and Shade is based on Kinbote’s insensitivity and cruelty toward Shade.28 However, the issue of cruelty is related to the problem of the novel’s unity. Alexander Nehamas has pointed out that cruelty is a more pervasive structural ingredient of the novel than Rorty would like to admit. Pale Fire exists as a thick play of interpretive com-merce between texts whose mutual relations are not obvious and need to be established. This action, in turn, will require our awareness of how the related texts feed off of one another in gestures of mutual appropriations. Pale Fire emerges as a process with such parasitical commerce inherent in it.29 Thus, the unity of Pale Fire depends on the reader’s capability of seeing that the texts by Kinbote and Shade participate in a larger whole – a proper reading of Pale Fire



30 Rorty, introduction to Pale Fire, p. xvii.31 Ibid.32 Ibid., p. viii.

will make these texts dependent on one another for their full meaning. The irony is that the characters are unaware of such complimentariness. But the completions become available to the readers on the condition that they are willing to engage in the redescription of the characters. Should they do so, the readers will co-create the novel Pale Fire, and will perhaps start sensing their own incompleteness.

Rorty is aware of this structural play active in the text: “The relations between Kinbote and Shade, as between their counterparts in each of us, are not simply oppositional. They are dialectical, as dialectical as the relations between our first, second, and twenty-second readings of Pale Fire.”30 It is these complex negotiations between various sides of their own selves, and the selves of others, that will increase the readers’ skill of moving about the mean-ders of pluralistic realities: “[Nabokov] was interested in making [his readers] people who could do things and feel things they had not been able to do or feel before.”31 Pragmatically speaking it is these kinds of skills that are responsible for our sense of what is “true” or “real.”

Rorty maintains that novels such as Pale Fire change our definitions of real-ity: they put “the real” under pressure, they “dent” the real, break its resistance to change.32 Here Rorty speaks of the vexed formal and structural relations between the text of an imaginative novel and the so called “reality” outside it. Pale Fire “dents” reality because it penetrates into its readers’ sense of what kind of interpretive connections are possible. The principal tool the novel uses in so restructuring our senses of reality is its own structural play by which the novel hypothesizes its own unity. It is this richly ironic activity that makes the novel occupy a peculiar spot as a checkpoint on the border between realities. Such positioning of the novel fascinates Rorty about Orwell’s 1984.

If the sense of the real is synonymous with the present day state of the com-plicated balances attendant on the play of descriptions and redescriptions, then the novel and reality are coextensive worlds made of the same sort of material: both consist of networks of beliefs under description and redescrip-tion. Rorty reads 1984 as a scenario, which, although generically called “fiction,” is in some way already present in the “real” world of Orwell’s readers. The real world does not enjoy the comfort of an inbuilt resistance to a “fictitious” world that could be permanently ruled by personalities such as that of O’Brien. The novel works as a reminder that the divides between our reality and even the grimmest of the scenarios of its future evolution are permeable. Rorty’s

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33 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. 171–174.

reading of the character of O’Brien is dictated by his non-foundational treat-ment of truth: there is no deep level of reality the correct representation of which could permanently prevent the dominance of the O’Briens of our own world. Rather than clamoring for the objectivity of the truth as the major good denied its citizens by a totalitarian regime, 1984 substitutes, according to Rorty, an activity of the play of scenarios for the idea that some scenarios will be privileged by their allegedly more accurate ties to “reality.”33

This reading makes the novel into an ironic device. 1984 straddles the outer rim of the post-wwii reality as a warning, providing glimpses of paths that would be catastrophic from the point of view of most of Orwell’s readers. What we do not know for sure is how close or how far the scenarios of this horrifying “fictitious” world are from our world. That Orwell’s fiction reverberated with readers – as it still does, for that matter – is proof that the germs of the horrify-ing fiction live in our present. What is ironic is that the place and space that the world of 1984 occupies in relation to what we call reality is posed to us as an interpretive task. Because this task consists in seeing the coherence of our own world as dependent on our ongoing interpretive care of the values that are central to it – the nature of this task is not much different from the one we perform when establishing the conditions for the coherence of ironic texts by Proust and Nabokov, thereby also defining the contours of our own aesthetic and moral selves. All of these novels are evanescent works, and as we try to establish the parameters of their coherence, they draw us into rich interpretive games, sometimes concerning the more “personal” or “private” regions of our belief networks, on other occasions concerning the more “public” nodes of those networks. Both as private personalities and as members of political sys-tems, humans participate in interpretive networks. The shapes these networks might temporarily achieve are plentiful, while the volatility of the process – the possibility of redescription – is ironic. Such ironic plenitudes are the proper environment of some literary texts.

Here is Rorty’s central intuition about literature: an equivocal play of descriptions found in some literary texts – the play which dictates the condi-tions of these works’ functioning as aesthetic objects – is qualitatively similar to the play of descriptions responsible for the coherence of the fabric of their readers’ reality. I have called this feature ironic plenitude.

Ironic plenitude is by no means limited to the literary works discussed by Rorty. Rorty’s reading of 1984 points to the novel as an evanescent catalyst of shifts between opposite political world descriptions. A great example of a



novel which amplifies this very feature is Philip K. Dick’s nightmarish divaga-tion on a precarious parallel coexistence of historically alternative and mutu-ally-exclusive worlds – The Man In the High Castle (1962). At the heart of this novel works a volatile principle of potentiality, shapeless and ironically inde-terminate as regards its own meaning, and it makes the novel into a transition device between politically opposite worlds, while the characters learn that it is their commitment to specific actions that might activate and perhaps modu-late the working of this principle.

I have mentioned Dick to suggest that Rorty’s intuitions on the novel test well against novels that go beyond the modernist masterpieces that he most usually focused on. However, for the rest of this essay, I am going to switch genres and concentrate on how these processes inform the work of two American poets.

5 Ironic Plenitude in American Poetry: Wallace Stevens and Rae Armantrout

If some novels contain ironic plenitude which catalyzes their capacity to shuttle between various belief-systems or world-descriptions, there are some poems which are condensed instances of this formal property. Such poems present themselves as imaginative linguistic devices responsible for the weav-ing of the description itself.

Rorty’s relation to poetry is much less theorized than his understanding of the novel. But if there is one poet whose work impressed Rorty in a more last-ing way, it would be Wallace Stevens. Stevens spent his entire creative life attempting to do in poetry what Rorty did in his philosophical books: to show that uses of language do not represent the world but disclose it, and thus are this world. Stevens’s formula for entering this epistemological prob-lem was to think of poetry as situated between two realms he called “reality” and “imagination.” It sometimes seems that they pull the poem in opposite directions, and critics have various ideas on how Stevens manages to resolve this tension. However, instead of summarizing this debate, here I am going to briefly present one poem by Stevens, coming from his later phase, which proposes his version of poetic realism: a realism beyond the idea of representation.

The poem in question is a rather notorious piece entitled “Description Without Place” from a volume called Transport to Summer. Some prominent Stevens critics, like Helen Vendler, thought of it as an excessive and ultimately arid exercise in theorizing the power of poetic description. Vendler calls the

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34 Helen Vendler, On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’ Longer Poems (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard up, 1969), p. 218.

35 Ibid., 227.

poem “an ode to the Adjective.”34 In it, Stevens conducts a meditation on the power of imaginative arrangements of words which sometimes result in world-changing ideas. The meditation proceeds in a calm, repetitive, mea-sured form, which Vendler will ultimately find to break down under the unbearable convolution of its theoretical tautologies.35

Stevens’s proposition is radical: in the midst of our understanding of his-torical places and moments works an activity of linking words into descrip-tions, which Sevens first calls “seemings,” only to realize in the course of the poem that these “seemings” are the only reality. Clearly, the ability in ques-tion is poetic. The poem is a revelation of the poetic nature of reality and rather than on particulars it concentrates on the underlying mechanism of producing descriptions and its capacity to keep doing so. The poetic medium is early on metaphorized as “the green queen” which stands for the freshness of imagination as it responds to the physical stimuli of the world, the basic one of which is the light of the sun. We are pushed to work by the rays of sun or moon, so to speak, and what is switched on in us is our own greenness: the fecundity of imagination. Imagination, for Stevens, is a kind of radiation or emission itself, a response to the radiation of the sun, and the monotony of the poem of which Vendler complains could be seen as the poem’s tuning in to its own frequency: the oncoming waves of its repetitive verses and tonality. These verses point to the basic function of all poems: they connect the physi-cality of language (the human-produced sound) into what we call thought. It is these connections which coalesce into our reports of the world: they are “seemings” as the only reality. At the base of reality there is the flow of the lines of poetry which mould matter (the sonic layer of language) into sense and thought. For Stevens all our perceptions of the world, all of our descrip-tions of it, stem from this poetic radiation, the action of his poem thus becoming a description of descriptions. Here is a fragment of section VI of the poem:

Description is revelation. It is notThe thing described, nor false facsimile.…A text we should be born that we might read.More explicit than the experience of sun



36 Wallace Stevens, “Description Without Place,” in Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1997), p. 301.

37 Ibid.38 Ibid., p. 302.

And moon, the book of reconciliation,Book of a concept only possible

In description, canon central in itself,The thesis of the plentifullest John.36

The world obtains its fullest meaning, is revealed to us, in the poetic action of which the poem is an instance. The poem – a thing made of words – is the plentiful source out of which the world obtains its shape. Worlds come from the ability of language to form descriptions. Stevens says in the next section:

it is a world of words to the end of it,In which nothing solid is its solid self.37

The key statement of this ode to description is saved for the final couplet and concerns the issue of commitment. The poetic action of linking sounds into thoughts and concepts runs on a special kind of sustenance. For Stevens, a poetic heir of Emerson, the sustenance must be the action itself, the doing, its circularity and tautological character. Imagination and what we say of the future must:

Be alive with its own seemings, seeming to beLike rubies reddened by rubies reddening.38

As Helen Vendler points out, the peculiarity of Stevens’s use of some verbs in the poem is that their more expected transitive grammatical aspect is replaced by the intransitive one, and the “rubies reddening” in the final line is the case in point. These stones are not imagined to impart color on other objects; they increase their redness on their own. It is the poem that is the only source of reality so it must also contain its own willingness to go on weaving the fabric of it.

“Description Without Place” is a harbinger of Rorty’s irony as the awareness of re-describability. The poem presents itself as the mechanism of describabil-ity itself, the ultimate source of descriptions. As such, it is immensely ironic. But being so, it is also pure commitment. Sitting on the threshold of future

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descriptions, the poem makes them dependent on its self-reflexive reinforce-ment: like “rubies reddened by rubies reddening” the poem finds conviction in producing new descriptions in its circularity. In Stevens’s poetry, such convic-tion is belief as commitment to one’s own action, with no non-circular justifi-cation, that replaces traditional religious faith, and in this Stevens clearly prefigures Rorty’s post-religious intuition according to which the literary work is a specific combination of irony with commitment.

Of course, Stevens’s solution to the problem of replacing representation with poetic description takes amply from the Romantic Emersonian concept of unity as power. Such notion of unity became the object of criticism in more recent American poetry. A lot of contemporary American poets increase the sense of the poem as a redescribable textual creation. These ironic poems do not give up commitment to their textual being, but they redefine the idea of the poem’s coherence to move away from Stevens’s trope of power as circularity. One of the most fruitful recent examples of the tension between the avoidance of conceptual or formal closure and the functioning of the poem as a hypo-thetically coherent textual being is found in the poetry of Rae Armantrout.

Armantrout has worked out a formula of the poem as a montage of more or less accidental, yet tauntingly related linguistic fragments. Given to the aes-thetics of recycling and assemblage, her poems absorb external and intention-ally unoriginal linguistic utterances, engage them in systems of rich sonic and conceptual echoes, which frequently leads to exposing current ideologies as threadbare fallacies. She is a poet of deep suspicion toward all descriptions, showing how they become co-opted ideological clichés. And yet, as aesthetic objects, her poems cannot afford to renounce the poetic power of striking up connections between materials. Here is a poem from Armantrout’s volume Versed, entitled “Integer”:

1.One what?One grasp?No hands.No collectionof stars. Something darkpervades it.

2.Metaphoris ritual sacrifice.It kills the look-alike.



39 Rae Armantrout, “Integer,” in Versed (Middletown, Conn.,: Wesleyan up, 2010), pp. 93–94.

No,metaphor is homeopathy.

A healthy cellexhibits contact inhibition.

3.These temporary creditswill no longer be reflectedin your next billing period.

4.“Dark” meaningnor reflecting,

not amenableto suggestion.39

This is a poem of dark irony, representative of Armantrout’s recent poetics. Unity is doubted and exposed as preposterous, even ominous. The “integer,” a mathematical concept of wholeness, is worked through in the first fragment and revealed as vacuous, the vacuity resembling a black whole. For Armantrout, the idea of a coherently closed whole, such as the whole of the traditional self-obsessed lyrical subjectivity, simply implodes under its tautological circularity. Thus the rest of the poem will perform a very complex task: it will try to func-tion as one literary object, while redefining the idea of oneness. This oneness is shot through with contradictions and tensions.

The second fragment deregulates our understanding of metaphor. First, metaphor, a classical poetic device of synthesizing materials, is rejected as a tool that kills otherness by absorption of extraneous entities through imposing identity on them. But the very next lines propose a different, reworked idea of metaphor, in which it is the same device with the reversed vector: it is now responsible for keeping elements healthily apart. The next fragment is an intrusion of recycled material: it is the language found on telephone or utilities bills. Finally the last fragment returns to the idea of “darkness” signaled early on in the first fragment.

While Stevens lectured on the power of the poetic language to radiate through matter and synthesize it into meaning, Armantrout practices this very

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40 Rae Armantrout, “Parting Shots,” in Just Saying (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan up, 2013), p. 23.

41 Ibid.

power, introducing two vital modifications. First, she dismisses Stevens’s obsession with circularity. Second, she substitutes analytic suspension of meaning for outright synthesis. Rather than a self-declared whole, the poem, while thoroughly distrustful of the materials it ingests, becomes a force field in which these extraneous, used up elements begin to reverberate with formal or conceptual echoes. We notice how the “dark” of the fourth fragment returns to the criticism of wholeness/oneness from the first one. Next, the use of the word “reflecting” in the final section connects the idea of “darkness” with the fiscal language of part 3: “credits / will no longer be reflected.” Incidentally, this connection casts ominous shadow over the meaning of “the next billing period” – when will this be, and where will we be then? The “dark” of the poem reverberates too with the title of the cycle of poems to which it belongs, which is “Dark Matter.” “Dark matter” is not to be accessed or absorbed: it is “not ame-nable to / suggestion.” Like the modified metaphor – the metaphor as healthy cell from fragment two – this is the poem’s ability to stay clear of the materials it ingests: it is the dark independence of the poem, its indeterminate principle of the suspension of first meanings of words and phrases activating the inter-pretive play of the poem. The darkness inside the poem is ambiguous: it signals the death of any excessively unified systems of thought, but it also stands for the power of the poem to notice and examine various cognitive connections.

In Armantrout’s poems the connections so examined are frequently clichéd political ideologies. In the second fragment of a poem called “Parting shots,” we hear a sniper, hiding “behind the only wall in sight,” saying to a tv crew that “his work is ‘invigorating’ / because it is ‘personal.’”40 There is something dis-turbing in the sniper’s description of his job as “invigorating” and “personal.” Our ability to worry about the disturbance will be increased when we trace a correlation between this fragment of the poem and the apparently completely disconnected former fragment, in which we hear reports of the early visitors to American national parks. They comment on the ambiguous “grandeur” of cliff walls which, although beautiful, radiate a “bracing sense of insignificance.”41 The poem presents an iconic American Romantic landscape, which divinizes rocky walls as a site of power, and then takes us to a scene of one of America’s contemporary wars. The pivotal linking word is “the wall”: it is now an American sniper who has taken on the role of the source of power, formerly rested with the sublime landscape. We only imagine the “bracing sense of insignificance” experienced by his targets. The Romantic sublime has morphed



into a problematic mixture of patriotism and professionalism which blinds Armantrout’s speaker to the terrible moral pathos of his situation, providing him with a justification which the reader will sense as being far too self- congratulatory and too complacent.

6 Concluding Remarks: Democracy and its Believers

I have tried to show how some literary works make redescribability their basic structural principle, thus substituting a necessarily dense play of interpreta-tion for stable and determinate meaning value. In so doing these works place themselves right in the midst of interpretive world-disclosing activities by which some humans – ironists – continuously redefine the parameters of their reality. These works exercise, care for, and foster the ability of making sense of the world without recourse to the idea of anything in this world having a per-manent cognitive or moral value. This property of the texts, which I have called ironic plenitude, is a structural combination of irony and commitment. I have traced the roots of ironic plenitude in the modernist texts discussed by Rorty himself, and I have signaled how this feature is more intensely present in some later texts. If we can treat these texts as imitations of complex personhood, we have a clear example of non-cynical compatibility of irony and commitment.

By showing this I also hope that I have addressed the second criticism against Rorty’s ironist: why suppose that the ironist will be committed to the cause of a liberal democracy, not a totalitarian regime? But here my argument has been indirect.

As we recall, Kundera’s atheist narrator was able to team up with Christian believers against an oppressive regime. This ability rests on an interpretive skill by which the ironist evaluates an institution without recourse to any funda-mentals. Because they appeal to these fundamentals, the religious believers will always see the Church as one and the same thing, and will thus be less prepared than the ironist for shifts of historical circumstances. Such shifts occurred in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the regime. During the regime, the Catholic Church in Eastern Europe was a stronghold of human dignity and human rights. But after the system change it has been hard for the Church authorities, at least in some countries, to find a role for their institution in a pluralistic democratic reality, in which freedom created a new environment for the negotiation of values. For example, in Poland, the Church has seen itself as entitled to a morally hegemonic position, justifying its infringement on various rights of individuals stemming from general civilizational progress. For the ironist, the identity of the Church has changed, while it has stayed the same for

78 Bartczak


the non-ironist believer. Among the two, it is clearly the ironist who can be trusted with guarding the environment of the democratic debate. It is easier for the ironist to produce a much needed criticism or opposition to a Church she has formerly embraced.

The ironist literature I have been pointing to is both a product of democracy and its critical filter. The formal and aesthetic evolution from Stevens to poets like Armantrout marks a huge increase in the ability displayed by a democrati-cally produced form to care for the health of democracy. This is care through attentive criticism. While Stevens demonstrated the power of poetry to pro-duce our descriptions of reality, Armantrout uses this very power to dismantle descriptions. An advanced democratic system is itself productive of versatile descriptions, and it is the function of poetry now not to muse on the ability of producing versions of reality – such ability being demonstrated daily by the political and economic powers – but to attend to the quality of the produced fabric. Armantrout’s poems intercept intrusive public discourses and reveal their frequently aggressive character. The poems are highly ironic: they are nothing but re-contextualization devices, absorbing languages and subjecting them to reevaluation processes. As such, the poems propose a non-foundational mode of being, in which internal plurality and poetic power gives back to democracy by purifying its products, potentially balancing the excesses of which modern democracies are capable. It is precisely such ironic poetic abil-ity to so reevaluate political descriptions that Rorty has in mind when he says that the ironist “worries” about the languages of her own tribe.

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