Article: Poetics as "Untruth": Revising Modern Claims for Literary Truths

There are two basic ways to engage the concept of revisionism in the history of ideas: one can stress the constant returnof themes under different rubrics or one can hope that one can isolate what is problematic in those repetitions in order to provide an alternative, an actual re-vision with claims to conceptual adequacy. Revision, in other words, can be the work of the ironist or the dialectician, each offering a possible stance toward what seem deep and intractable conceptual problems. Unfortunately nothing better fits the ironist’s worldview than the apparently inevitable failures of the dialecticians among us. There is always some level on which what seemed a substantial difference from some other theoretical position on a topic turns out to be fundamentally the same as what it attempts to revise. Therefore dialectics is haunted by what we might call the negative of dialectics, the propensity to have assertions of difference swallowed up within a sense of inescapable repetition of the same old follies in new guises.

Can there also be a negative of such irony, a position from which the claims to sameness seem facile and hence from which it seems possible to work out substantially different ways to approach issues and needs that had come to seem hopelessly mired in outworn oppositional structures? In this essay I hope to explore that possibility by attempting to revise and make vital what has probably been the most fundamental thesis within modern poetics—that the arts’ major contribution to society is their providing a version of truth not possible in discursive disciplines. The standard account insists that the ideal of “truth” driving the sciences is a reductive one because, ironically, it relies too completely on representational ideals. Science takes on the task of testing hypotheses by spelling out the descriptions they entail and holding up the pictures so derived for empirical testing. Being so bound to a pictorial view of the world, however, science cannot adequately account for the various framing conditions that make the picture possible or that afford it significance. Science cannot account for its own agency, for the range of affects that go into its investigations, or for the possible human significance of its discoveries—all aspects of “truth” that art can elaborate because it somehow captures the immediate dynamics of perception and explores the range of desires that such perceptions bring into play. ¹

I think it is clear that the now standard versions of this position cannot be revived—in part because science is not as readily demonized as it once was, and in part because art is not so idealizable a cognitive instrument as it once seemed. Yet we seem hard-pressed for alternatives. At one pole there remain available modest theoretical stances content to claim distinctive pleasures for the aesthetic or to rely on art’s capacities to elicit and clarify emotional aspects of our experiences. And at the other pole there are quite immodest stances which take their strength largely from their capacity not only to deny art these claims to specialness but also to contextualize those claims as themselves important elements within an “aesthetic ideology” whose work it is theory’s task to expose. For one whose experiences of literature and visual art were shaped by those modernist ambitions, neither position can suffice. More important, their co-presence warrants something close to a rhetoric of crisis because it is clear that the limitations of the one encourage a problematic hubris in the other. And then one more irony emerges. For the more confident social theorists become that theirs is the most fruitful stance to take toward these arts, the more they become the direct heirs of failed modernist ambitions. It is they who promise a “truth” for the study of art, if not for the artworks themselves, since they can clarify how the aesthetic imagination functions socially as defense, mask, and locus of contradictions. ²

I overstate the case somewhat. For there is one version of art as a distinctive mode of truth that still has considerable currency. However, that position is sufficiently problematic to...