Guiding Metaphors: Robert Frost and the Rhetoric of Jamesian Pragmatism

DAVID H. EVANS Guiding Metaphors: Robert Frost and the Rhetoric ofJamesian Pragmatism Pragmatism's current revival has borne on its broad banners the promise of many good things, not least among them the hope of a final settlement in philosophy's long quarrel with poetry. No literary critic would want to scoff at such a possibility, especially when the peace, or at least the version that has been projected by Richard Rorty, is to be effected by what is essentially philosophy's surrender of its higher ground, and the shelving of its claim to have access to a truth truer than any fiction can offer. No doubt a large part of pragmatism's appeal lies in the proposal that philosophy and literature begin to associate on a level playing field, that literary criticism has at least as much to say about the products of the philosophers, as philosophy does about those of the poets, and that interleague games should now become a regular part of the intellectual schedule. Indeed, Rorty would go further , arguing philosophy should recognize the bankruptcy of its pretensions , and admit that the real interest of its greatest texts derives from their status as works of imaginative literature, self-supporting structures of narrative and metaphor. For it is shared metaphor that is finally the basis of the consensus and communication: the intellectual community that philosophy has so long and so misguidedly sought in the Utopian regions of rationally revealed truth. To a literary critic, this may seem a consummation devoutly to be wished; I want to argue however that Rorty's version of the pragmatic sanction comes at too high a cost—the cost of avoiding a consideraArizona Quarterly Volume 57, Number 3, Autumn 2001 Copyright © 2001 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1610 62 David H. Evans tion of the real nature and importance of literary language. What his optimistic model neglects is the inherent duplicity of figurative language , its disruption of conventional denotative connections—a disruption that can sometimes put in question the possibility of communication as such. Insofar as figurative language requires the potential for mis-understanding, that is, literature can never replace philosophy, because it is always displacing Rorty's philosophical project of creating connections and communities, forcing to the foreground the disconcerting experience of the linguistic gaps that disrupt the effort to forge the link, to complete the journey, between sign and meaning, speaker and listener, text and reader. What literature exposes is something which certain versions of pragmatism have found it difficult to acknowledge— that language is the source not only ofthe possibility ofcommunication and community, but their perpetual uncertainty as well. To test this claim, I want to look at an early case of an interaction between pragmatism and poetry in the complicated dialogue between William James and Robert Frost. For here we have an instance, I would argue, in which a poet was responding directly to a pragmatic theory of meaning, but in a way that confronts some of the problems elided by that theory. It was Robert Frost, astute self-critic, who first declared William james to be "the most valuable teacher ... I never had,"1 and critics of late have been forcefully reasserting the contention that the philosophy of James provides perhaps the single most important intellectual context for the poetry of Frost (e.g., Poirier Poetry; Lentricchia Modernist ). It is, indeed, not difficult to detect elective affinities between the philosopher and the poet who studied closely, and sometimes taught, a number of his works.2 Frost's enduring conviction that life is an affair of rugged individual assertion against a potentially hostile world, and his corresponding conception of poetry as a vital performance enacted against a background of confusion, the "figure of the will braving alien entanglements" ("The Constant Symbol" 401), closely parallel James's arguments that "truth is made" in the dynamic process by which "we break the flux of sensible reality into things ... at our will" (Pragmatism 104, 122).' Similarly, the constant emphasis in James's writings on the transitional nature of experience has its echo in Frost's sense that both life and poetry are temporal processes, and that every stay, poetic...