Ricoeur, Literature and Imagination by Sophie Vlacos (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ricoeur, Literature and Imagination by Sophie Vlacos Brian O’Keeffe Sophie Vlacos, Ricoeur, Literature and Imagination New York: Bloomsbury, 2014, 232 pp. i In the preface to her book, Sophie Vlacos wonders why Ricoeur’s place within the order of the great literary theorists seems somehow in doubt. Certainly, few would dispute his renown as a philosopher. But in literary-theoretical contexts, Ricoeur often serves merely as a foil to more radical positions, as a person to whom reference is made when it proves necessary to acknowledge, en passant, something true about literature—to say why it is a precious stimulus to the imagination, and why literature’s own sense of imaginative possibility is valuable to re-envisioning the world itself. But then theory moves on, and affirmations of literature’s value become [End Page 364] harder to find in the midst of austere talk concerning its irresolvable ambiguity, such ambiguity apparently rendering all acts of reading wrong or “aberrant.” Theory brings us up short, confronts us with interpretive impasse, and proclaims that literature will ineluctably bring us to this, whatever are our desires as readers to read for the pleasures of an imaginative immersion in fictional worlds. Theory liked it this way, however. It liked the taxing rigor of interpretive reading doomed to a kind of failure. It preached, often in the teeth of stiff resistance to theory, the virtue of doing hard critical work at the coalface of texts that had become peculiarly forbidding to those who ventured to read them at all. This is a caricature. It caricatures literary studies during the age of High Theory, and it also presents a rather disobliging portrait of the interpretive approach of Paul de Man—my allusion to The Resistance to Theory will not, I trust, have gone unmissed. But that age has been declared over, and so perhaps one quick answer to Vlacos’s question about the place of Ricoeur in literary-theoretical contexts is that he simply had to wait it out. High Theory’s day is done, and we may now return to Ricoeur and affirm the value of reading literature: reading is an act of feeling, an imaginative feeling-into a fictional world; reading literature is good for our general cultivation, our Bildung; reading helps us make sense of the world and our place in it; literature is a creative activity, and it powerfully re-describes the world to us; it teaches readers to imagine themselves otherwise; it hones our sympathies and our empathies—these, the basic components of the specifically ethical imagination. One mentions ethics, and already there is another possible answer to Vlacos’s question, namely that Ricoeur had to wait for the “ethical turn” in literature and philosophy. In this respect, it is notable that Martha Nussbaum features prominently in Vlacos’s book: in the last section, which addresses Ricoeur in terms of the turn to ethics, and Nussbaum also provides the epigraph to Vlacos’s introduction. The quote, from Love’s Knowledge, is well-known: “After reading Derrida, and not Derrida alone, I feel a certain hunger for blood; for, that is, writing about literature that talks of human lives and choices as if they matter to us all” (1). We will get to Derrida, because literary theory’s debt to Derrida provides another explanation as to why Ricoeur’s hermeneutics met with such little enthusiasm during the age of theory. It is not quite that the wax-and-wane of theoretical prestige during that time can be reduced to Derrida versus Ricoeur, as if theory simply chose to put itself under the aegis of “Derrida,” and in so doing, Ricoeur was eclipsed. But their fortunes seem entwined, especially in the contexts of Anglo-American academia, where the importation of French theory, I think it is fair to say, did produce a certain “star-system.” But if, and reverting to Nussbaum’s criticism of theoretical anemia, the problem with theory was that it seemed oddly impersonal, and reduced literature to a similar impersonality, Vlacos evidently considers Ricoeur to be exempt from her charge. For he does speak about literature, [End Page 365] and does acknowledge that what matters is how...