Booth, Rorty, Scarry: The Wall and the Ethical Age

Abstract

BOOTH, RORTY, SCARRY: THE WALL AND THE ETHICAL AGE D A V ID H E IN IM A N N Northwest College PO ST M O D E R N ISM ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The ideolog­ ical conflict that supported it has been decided in favour of liberalism, and the decades of polemical debate that structured twentieth-century theory and criticism are now footnotes to the reform that is attempting to arc its rainbow over the smoggy, drab weariness of Eastern Europe and Russia. So our politicians and writers such as Francis Fukuyama like to tell us, though we are learning that the rainbow might be shining from the fool’s-gold pot of Western deficit financing. Yet, even if Gregory Elliott wisely cautions that we have heard pronouncements of the “end of history” before (415), John Guillory can also claim that the emergence of neo-pragmatism permits us to now historicize “ ‘an age of theory’ ” (177). The fall of the Wall signifies more than just the humiliating and dystopic exposure of that ideological promise variously represented as the workers’ paradise and the evil empire. If the Cold War — and before it the conflict Marx initiated with capitalism — can be seen as a greater teleological conflict of pragmatism and idealism, the decision, having gone in favour of pragmatism, signals an end to an era of debate not just in political economy but also in literary and cultural studies. Positions east and west of the ruined Wall, from a governmental Havel and a newly moral Derrida to mainstreamed Native studies and apocalyptic ecocriticism , are now being established for intellectual exploration into what, for lack of a better term, we can call the ethical age. Writing recently on the twentieth century, A.W. Heidemann presented the problem of a literary culture that has sacrificed contact with what Husserl called the “Lebenswelt,” or “the world of actual experience,” for “structural or linguistic interests” in which human agency is questioned and people are reduced “to the status of ciphers” (356-57). That surface of actual experi­ ence remains fundamentally important, however, to our self-definition, as it is where we spend the greater part of our existence, and Heidemann does see signs that some writers, “especially those of Eastern Europe” (358), are overcoming excessive abstraction in their appeal to “our empathic and af­ fective powers” (359). I want to pursue Heidemann’s witness and suggest how his hope is going to arise out of the rubble of the most potent symbol E n g l is h S t u d i e s in C a n a d a , 22, 4 , D ecem b er 1996 of our century, the symbol of our literary and cultural as well as political divide. Just as linguistics-oriented Modernism was jettisoned with the issue of rights in the ideologically driven 1960s, Postmodernism, having become the Day-Glo mural of Modernism, is being swept up with the broken cement blocks of the Berlin Wall. Pieces of each are valuable souvenirs, but more im­ portant is the repaving of the road that the Wall blocked off. There are new contractors in to replace Harold Bloom’s deconstruction road crew: Wayne C. Booth, Richard Rorty, and Elaine Scarry, if their terms are maintained, represent the reconstruction of the highway along which the ethical age will send its business. The reconstruction requires development from plans that call for a foun­ dation in three areas: the establishment of the problem of human pain and suffering as the prime thesis for a renewal of evaluative criticism; the cre­ ation of a descriptive, as opposed to theoretical, underpinning to narrative and analysis; and the continuation of the materialist philosophy grounded in Marx, yet with the ideological curbs broken off to permit access from any direction to the central concern for the status and liberation of the body in pain. The contract I am proposing evolves from three works primarily: Booth’s The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, Rorty’s Contin­ gency, Irony, and Solidarity, and Scarry’s The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. They intersect in their mutual concern for...