In Defense of Paraphrase

This essay notes initially an assumption underlying much of the criticism addressing ethics and literaturethe belief that if there is something especially ethically significant about literature, it results from the peculiar nature of the relationship between the aesthetic text and its reader. Readings relying on this assumption often seek to outperform each other in emphasizing their attention to the ineffable features of literary texts, while criticizing rivals as inappropriately reading for a paraphrasable “message” commendable on philosophical grounds. I suggest that an alternative approach, one that sees the paraphrasable ideas such texts express as part of what makes them worthwhile, would be promising. The essay goes on to defend this account from two objections: an aesthetic objection, which suggests that it is mistaken to see literary texts as making theoretical assertions at all; and an objection from the history of literary criticism, which points out that it is debatable whether this approach is really new. I respond to the first by arguing that in fact moral-philosophical ideas are a necessary element of the artistic form of narratives, especially that of realist novels. Insofar as narratives necessarily involve the depiction of persons who make decisions and subsequently act, they cannot help but present at least an implicit view of the nature of human agency. Moreover, when narrators describe and reflect upon the decisions and actions of such characters, their articulations bring the implicit philosophical claims to a level of awareness. I draw out these ideas through a brief reading of George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The reply to the second objection depends on a genealogy of interpretative theory, one that draws out how an opposition to critical emphasis on ideas in literature developed within formalist theories of the novel, a process culminating in the New Critical insistence that literary ideas matter only insofar as they create an aesthetic structure. The genealogy shows then how deconstruction and the hermeneutics of suspicion share this fundamental opposition through their insistence that one must go beyond the mere ideas in a text to something more fundamental—either its reliance upon a fundamental instability or its repression of a non-normative political entity. Against this opposition, I propose a “content formalism”: an approach that openly admits its primary attention to the intellectual content of the literary work while accompanying this attitude with a non-reductive recognition of the importance of literary form.