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C O N C E P T S
What is confusing in literary studies is that when people write about
literature, it may often seem, as Rorty might put it, that they are just us
ing literary works to tell stories about the myriad problems o f human ex
istence. But sometimes they are in fact attempting to analyze aspects o f
the language, the system, the subroutines o f literature, if you will, while
presenting what they are doing as an interpretation o f the literary works.
The attempt to understand how literature works is not o f interest to ev
eryone— like the attempt to understand the structure of natural languages
or the properties o f computer programs. But the idea o f literary study as a
discipline is precisely the attempt to develop a systematic understanding of
the semiotic mechanisms o f literature, the various strategies o f its forms.
What is missing from Rorty’s response, therefore, is any sense that
literary studies might consist o f more than loving and responding to char
acters and themes in literary works. He can imagine people using litera
ture to learn about themselves— certainly a major use o f literature— but
not, it seems, learning something about literature. It is surprising that a
philosophical movement that styles itself “Pragmatism” should neglect this
eminently practical activity o f learning more about the functioning o f im
portant human creations, such as literature; for whatever epistemologi-
cal problems might be posed by the idea o f “knowledge” o f literature, it
is clear that practically, in studying literature, people do not just develop
interpretations (uses) o f particular works but also acquire a general under
standing o f how literature operates— its range o f possibilities and charac
teristic structures.
But more than this neglect o f institutional realities o f knowledge,
what is particularly disquieting about contemporary American Pragma
tism— o f Rorty and Stanley Fish, for example— is that people who at
tained their positions of professional eminence by engaging in spirited
debate with other members o f an academic field, such as philosophy or lit
erary studies, by identifying the difficulties and inconsistencies o f their el
ders’ conceptions o f the field and by proposing alternative procedures and
goals, have, once they attain professional eminence, suddenly turned and
rejected the idea o f a system o f procedures and body o f knowledge where
argument is possible and presented the field as simply a group o f people
reading books and trying to say interesting things about them. In effect,
they would systematically destroy the structure through which they at
Interpretation: Defending “Overinterpretation”
179
tained their positions and which would enable others to challenge them in
their turn. Stanley Fish, for instance, established himself by offering theo
retical arguments about the nature o f literary meaning and the role o f the
reading process and claiming that his predecessors who had pronounced
on this topic were w r o n g . O n c e he had reached a position o f eminence,
however, he turned around and said something like, “Actually, there isn’t
anything here one could be right or wrong about; there isn’t such a thing as
the nature of literature or of reading; there are only groups of readers and
critics with certain beliefs who do whatever it is that they do. And there is
no way in which other readers can challenge what I do because there is no
position outside belief from which the validity o f a set o f beliefs could be
adjudicated.” This is a less-happy version o f what Rorty, in his response,
calls the narrative o f “pragmatist’s progress,” in which one gets beyond
questions o f truth and “all descriptions are evaluated according to their ef
ficacy as instruments for purposes, rather than by their fidelity to the ob
ject described” {10 , 92).
Richard Rorty’s own Philosophy and the M irror o f Nature is a pow
erful work o f philosophical analysis precisely because it grasps the philo
sophical enterprise as a system with a structure and shows the contradic
tory relations between various parts o f that structure— reladons that put
in question the foundational character o f that enterprise.To tell people
they should give up attempting to identify underlying structures and sys
tems but just use texts for their own purposes is to attempt to block other
people from doing work like that for which he gained recognition. Simi
larly, it is all very well to say that students o f literature should not bother
trying to understand how literature works but should just enjoy it or read
on in the hope o f finding books that will change their lives. Such a vision
o f literary study, though, by denying any public structure of argument in
which the young or marginalized could challenge the views o f their emi
nent elders, helps make their positions unassailable and in effect confirms
a structure in place by denying that there is a structure. Ultimately the cru
cial issue in Rorty’s thinking here is not so much the distinction (or lack
thereof) between interpretation and use but the claim that we should not
13. See in particular Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in “Paradise
Zort” (Berkeley; University of California Press, 1967).
14. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the M irror o f Nature (Princeton, N J:
Princeton University Press, 1979).
i8o
C O N C E P T S
bother to understand how texts work any more than we should seek to
understand how computers work because we can use them perfectly well
without such knowledge. Literary studies should be the attempt to gain
such knowledge.
But to return to the disagreement between Eco and Rorty about in
terpretation. One thing Rorty and Eco share is a desire to dismiss decon
struction, which shared desire suggests that, contrary to popular report,
deconstruction is alive and well. Curiously, however, Eco and Rorty give
very nearly opposing descriptions o f deconstruction. Eco seems to take it
as “a radical reader-oriented theory o f interpretation,” as if it said that a
text means anything a reader takes it to mean {
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