The Novelist as Cultural Hero of Moder- nity? On Richard Rorty’s New Pragma- tism

Let us begin with a generalisation: Richard Rorty’s approach to literature is consistently – to use his own opposition – ‘solidarity-related’; what he calls the ‘other side’, literary self-creation, remains programmatically and intentionally undiscussed. One gets the impression that literature, and the novel in particular, is being burdened with an (‘unbearable’) heaviness of responsibility. Does the novel in Rorty’s reflections appear as a source of multifarious metaphors, of whole worlds born out of a writer’s imagination? Is there in it another dimension, where mundane obligations no longer bind the human being and where one can give rein to usually hidden desires and passions? The answer is in the negative. The world of fiction of which Richard Rorty writes is a pragmaticised one, where fiction itself is supposed first to build, and then defend, a democratic, liberal order. At the other extreme, there is philosophy with its right to choose self-creation (encapsulated, perhaps, in fragments of Derrida: telecommunicational fantasies from The Post Card or quasi-polemics from Limited Inc.). The situation as outlined by Rorty might be described in the following manner: while the writer has to be responsible (in a manner similar to Sartre’s conception of littérature engagée), the philosopher may indulge in a certain amount of irresponsibility, or may cease trying always to say something relevant about social problems. It is as if, after more than twenty five centuries, the ‘poets’ are being ordered back into the polis and made to think about the state and laws, which relieves at least some philosophers from the respectful Platonic duty of ‘enlightening the darkness’ of the world.