Shortly after I began my Montaigne Project, I started to question why I was doing it. What was it about Montaigne’s essays and the type of writing they inspired appealed to me, given that I hadn’t previously taken up this style?
In this chapter, Rorty has a surprising answer for me: because I’m emulating the literary style I came of age around. Rorty’s book was written while I was in college and it’s a reflection of the intellectual trends of that era. The late 80s-early 90s were a golden age for literary criticism, and Rorty describes the writers who took up this genre this way:
They spend their time placing books in the context of other books, figures in the context of other figures. This placing is done in the same way as we place a new friend or enemy in the context of old friends and enemies. In the course of doing so, we revise our opinions of both the old and the new. Simultaneously, we revise our own moral identity by revising our own final vocabulary. Literary criticism does for ironists what the search for universal moral principles is supposed to do for metaphysicians.
There’s so much in that paragraph to unpack. First of all, it’s a wonderful description of what Montaigne did in his own project, placing books and ideas in the context of others, tossing in his own (often shifting) perspective. It is also exactly what I do with my writing projects since I began following Montaigne, one that I cling to whether it’s literally about Montaigne or about movies, novels, philosophy, whatever.
But what I really like about this thought is that it also helps explain the kinds of people I’m drawn to. I very rarely spend my time at this point in my life with people with similar life experiences as me. I don’t need to be around people from my generation, who grew up where I did, who have the same stories that I’ve heard a million times. To me, it’s far more interesting to engage with people who give me a different perspective on the world.
That’s the crucial element of literary criticism, perspective:
For us ironists, nothing can serve as a criticism of a final vocabulary save another such vocabulary; there is no answer to a redescription save a re-re-redescription. Since there is nothing beyond vocabularies which serves as a criterion of choice between them, criticism is a matter of looking on this picture and on that, not of comparing both pictures with the original. Nothing can serve as a criticism of a person save another person, or of a culture save an alternative culture – for persons and cultures are, for us, incarnated vocabularies. So our doubts about our own characters or our own culture can be resolved or assuaged only by enlarging our acquaintance.
Which partially answers the question of why my Montaigne Project has never reached a book-level completion — because there is no final vocabulary to a project like this, only a continuous re-evaluation. I remember when my first attempt at a book was shopped around publishing houses by my literary agent back in 2012. An editor at Random House liked the writing but thought the project was better off remaining a blog, that the medium better fit the material.
If you accept my new construction that Montaigne was the first literary critic just as much as he was the first essayist, then this statement from Rorty applies very well:
Ironists read literary critics, and take them as moral advisers, simply because such critics have an exceptionally large range of acquaintance. They are moral advisers not because they have special access to moral truth but because they have been around. They have read more books and are thus in a better position not to get trapped in the vocabulary of any single book.
And I’d like to think (or maybe just hope) that is this is the primary reason to read my work, because I’ve made an attempt at understanding and synthesizing a lot of different works and even if you don’t buy my take on any of the material, the thought process involved might provoke a reader to have their own ideas about the source material, without having to slog through all the original text.
Returning to the context of when Rorty’s book was written, he then lists a bunch of works a contemporary literary critic should know that reads so much like the books my friends and I read and talked about in that era:
In the present Orwellian-Bloomian culture she is expected to have read The Gulag Archipelago, Philosophical Investigations, and The Order of Things as well as Lolita and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. The word “literature” now covers just about every sort of book which might conceivably have moral relevance – might conceivably alter one’s sense of what is possible and important. The application of this term has nothing to do with the presence of “literary qualities” in a book. Rather than detecting and expounding such qualities, the critic is now expected to facilitate moral reflection by suggesting revisions in the canon of moral exemplars and advisers, and suggesting ways in which the tensions within this canon may be eased – or, where necessary, sharpened.
From here, Rorty takes a turn into the question of whether the rise of literary criticism created a sense of elitism at universities. I’ll save this dour subject for the next essay. I’ll close today’s with a posthumous thank you to Rorty for better explaining the writing projects I take on reflexively than I’ve ever thought of on my own.
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