Worldly Acts and Sentient Things: The Persistence of Agency from Stein to DeLillo (review)

Robert Chodat's erudite book revitalizes the study of philosophy and literature by recalling critical attention to intentionality, a concept that encompasses the "agency" of Chodat's subtitle and that extends to semantic considerations. For too long, treatments of intentionality have been limited by now tired discussions of the "death of the author." Chodat turns to an alternate intellectual tradition, Anglo-American philosophy of language, which has been systematically denigrated in postmodern theory, much to the impoverishment of that theory and also to the detriment of "accounts of modern and contemporary literary texts" (14). Chodat is lucidly conversant with the philosophy of Wittgenstein, Quine, and Wilfrid Sellars—names not typically associated with studies of Stein, Bellow, Ellison, and DeLillo, the four authors to whose work he devotes chapters. Putting these philosophers and writers in dialogue allows Chodat to offer complex, suggestive discussions of the relationship between intentions and actions, causal determinations and affective states, individual dispositions and cultural systems. Chodat incisively notes the frequency with which writers attribute intentional properties to non-human entities. He convincingly argues that, despite a century's worth of critique—from modernist literature, poststructuralist theory, and cognitive science—intentionality persists in multiple forms: sometimes attenuated, other times robust, but always pertinent to the study of human agents and cultural artifacts.

The book unfolds in two parts of three chapters each and juggles multiple oppositions: worldly acts versus sentient things, agents within versus agents without, (embodied) persons versus (immaterial) presences. The first and third chapters of each part treat a literary work—Stein's "If I Told Him: A Complete Portrait of Picasso," Bellow's Henderson the Rain King, Ellison's Invisible Man, and DeLillo's Underworld—and bracket a chapter devoted to a philosophical analysis of the book's main themes. "Analysis" is not quite the right word, as Chodat primarily offers summaries of arguments, or "descriptions of descriptions" (240). This strategy reflects his awareness that the figures he discusses are relatively unfamiliar. That's likely correct with regard to Sellars and Niklas Luhmann, for example, but readers familiar with Nietzsche, William James, or Wittgenstein might wish Chodat were less descriptive and more polemical.

Chodat argues that twentieth-century criticisms of intentional acts either work from "the inside" or from "the outside." The former emphasize, with Stein, the inability of language to capture the texture of cognition. The latter emphasize, with DeLillo, the autonomy of cultural systems above and beyond the intentions of individual subjects. Although in each author's work "insides" and "outsides" open on to each other, it is Bellow and Ellison who emerge as the literary heroes of Chodat's narrative (with Wittgenstein and Sellars as their philosophical counterparts), combining the mental and the physical as well as the individual and the social in their representations of embodied agents acting in the world.

Chodat's discussion of Bellow, who serves as a linchpin between the "agents within" of part one and the "agents without" of part two, constitutes to my mind the strongest chapter of the book. Chodat shows how, in Bellow's novels, embodied agents mediate a "gap between the way one person perceives and describes the public world and the way the world really is" (113). This reading serves as a corrective to contemporary criticism, which, when it acknowledges Bellow at all, tends to light upon the spiritual aspects of his work, either to celebrate (often uncritically) or to condemn (often tendentiously). Chodat's reading of the physical and embodied aspects of Bellow's work is one that scholars will reckon with and learn from for years to come, prompting fruitful dialogue concerning the relationship between these two seemingly opposed features of Bellow's fiction.

The book's scope departs from some conventions of twentieth-century literary study. Chodat notes that Bellow and Ellison, and, one might add, Wittgenstein, "are not easily allocated into stalls such as Modernism and Postmodernism" (15...