Neoliberalism in Rorty and Forster - Richard Rorty and E.M. Forster

Of course, capital Tragedy itself may seem to be an utterance that belongs to just another old final vocabulary. In reminding us of Aeschylus and Sophocles it may seem to emanate from one of the most ancient vocabularies of all. Thus Margaret may seem to be grasping after a moribund old self rather than creating a new one. But Rorty's term is "redescription," not "neodescription." One's alternative description need not be absolutely new, just relatively so. Thus Margaret's way of figuring tragedy--humanistically, as "eyes" and "hands" suggest--is truly innovative, and ironist, even if the figure is itself an ancient one. For it is by means of this figure that she tropes the contemporary, faceless figure of tragedy as nothing but aimless disaster, just another outcome of muddle--just the latest squalor. To be sure, Margaret's image of tragedy is not as innovative as it could be; she could trope squalor more radically. She could employ what Nietzsche calls "the Dionysian"; the humanistic kind of tragedy she does propose is remarkably Apollinian and thus, according to Nietzsche, "illusory": "the Apollinian tears man from his orgiastic self-annihilation and blinds him to the universality of the Dionysian process, deluding him into the belief that he is seeing a single image of the world" (128). Nevertheless, there is wisdom in preferring the Apollinian to the Dionysian--could Leonard's story sustain Dionysian wonder? Early in the story Helen Schlegel remarks that Leonard "isn't capable of tragedy" (89). Of course, it is Helen who isn't capable, and one may celebrate Margaret for deciding that Leonard is. But Margaret's sense of proportion is even more impressive than her generosity; she alone chooses the kind of tragedy which Leonard may better instantiate. Knowing well which mode would better serve, she knows best the limits of her own redescriptive power. Clearly she is not suppressing radical possibility; she does not advocate the humanistic, Apollinian mode of tragedy as a means of escaping from the Dionysian. The contingencies she deplores are not Dionysian so much as decrepit, decayed--distinctly modern.

One admires Margaret's decisiveness no less than her redescriptive savvy or figural resourcefulness. Still, her powerful command of the figure suggests a certain risk inherent in liberal ironism: the ambition to evade one kind of modernist description, that of apocalyptic Squalor, may drive us to practice a more debilitating modernism, that of the imperial narcissist. In a revisionist essay on modernism and imperialism Fredric Jameson argues that "Modernism [in Howards End] ... emerges in [a] spatial gap within Forster's figure[s]"--it "is at one with the contradiction between the contingency of physical objects and the demand for an impossible meaning, here marked by dead philosophical abstraction" (55).(7) Jameson's example of a contingent physical object is Forster's Great North Road (Howards 14-15), but he may as well be talking about Leonard's dead body, that embodiment of contingency, the appearance of which also seems to elicit a "demand for impossible meaning." Though here the demand is marked not by a philosophical concept ("infinity" [15]) but by an aesthetic mode ("Tragedy"), here too it may be wiser to embrace the local and contingent (Squalor) than to seek the spacious and the transcendent; for the latter ambition issues in figuration which is narcissistic and thus, at least potentially, both self-destructive and oppressive--which is even, as Jameson declares, "imperialistic."