Fictions of Fact and Value: The Erasure of Logical Positivism in American Literature 1945–1975 by Michael LeMahieu

Abstract

Michael LeMahieu’s first book both makes the case and develops a method for reading postwar US fiction’s philosophical logic in terms of its immediate academic milieu, rather than through lenses imposed by later critics and theorists. Tracing literary responses to logical positivism’s precedence in mid-century US philosophical culture, LeMahieu demonstrates this positivism’s determining but curiously disavowed role in the rhetoric of the era’s university-centric fiction, from Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People” (1955) to a swan song in Don DeLillo’s End Zone (1972). Dense with both archival research and philosophical exegesis, LeMahieu’s project is narrowly conceived in all the best and some of the less appealing senses of the term. An unnecessary reticence about its intended range of implication leaves the book open to substantial quibbles, but at its core stand, unquibblably, a revisionary history of philosophical circulation and authorial inspiration, a fresh genealogy of the postmodern, and an exemplification of a method. Postmodern theory’s autobiography—a “narrative of progress” about its triumph over a still unrevised caricature of “positivism as an ahistorical, universal idea that can show up anywhere at any time but will always be rejected easily and uniformly” (16)—has, LeMahieu suggests, given us a distorted and badly taxonomized sense of the postwar literary landscape. Treating logical positivism’s absolute separation of facts from values as “the central moral question of the period,” he reads his fictions “not [as] a simple rejection of logical positivism but instead a sustained aesthetic response to its doctrines” (96). He thus revises “logical positivism’s ahistorical afterlife in literary studies” (17) through historical accounts both of postwar fiction’s uneasy, non-uniform engagement with the fact/value distinction, and of the way in which that fiction came to be so consistently read in relation to a “concept of postmodernism . . . premised on not knowing, and thus not owning, its debt to logical posi