Paul:
I found myself caught up in your essay and agreeing nearly every step of the way, even while I kept thinking of related themes. It seems to me that the ideas of deconstruction are usually so foreign to anyone's actual experience of reading that they hardly need any detailed refutation -- or rather, it seems as if they shouldn't need it. In graduate school the avid deconstructionists often reminded me of the kid in the second grade who had heard the bad news about Santa Claus and simply had to tell all the other kids, thus (he hoped) wrecking their fun and at the same time establishing his own greater sophistication. But of course all the kids kept believing and, in a sense, making Santa real -- and so did he. That, as you say, is "the power of literary representation to illuminate and transform human life." We don't so much believe it because it's true as we make it true by believing it.
That brings me to two writers who fit right into your argument: William James and a poet on whom he had great influence, Robert Frost. The "fuzzy logicians" you talk about can almost certainly trace many of their ideas back to William James, who described the (healthy) brain as a kind of democracy made up of competing impulses that nevertheless arrives at consensus, albeit often temporarily. There's always a residuum of uncertainty or doubt or (to use a big time critical term) ambiguity that, ideally, keeps the story open. In Frost's best poems, it seems to me, we can almost obeserve ourselves vicariously having such an experience. "The Road Not Taken" is the classic example, a poem that seems so certain of itself but that is almost impossible to reduce to a simple formula and see whole at the same time. As Frost put it, "I want to say things that almost but don't quite formulate."
Thanks for a stimulating read, Paul.
RPW
|
Threaded Mode
