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

As Rorty himself suggests, the narcissistic ambition of self-creation sometimes transforms the pursuit of a merely autonomous sense of self (and a new or merely different vocabulary) into the pursuit of absolute self-freedom (a final vocabulary). Such selves in such moments "attempt to rise above the plurality of appearances in the hope that, seen from the heights, an unexpected unity will become evident--a unity which is a sign that something real has been glimpsed, something which stands behind the appearances and produces them" (CIS 96). To such hubristic transcendentalism even liberals are susceptible. Allowing their ironism to wane, thus leaving unchecked their liberal ambition, even they may engage in hubristic attempts to achieve a "sublime" independence from all appearances, whether they be cultural, material, or metaphysical (CIS 105). Like Jameson, Rorty accordingly warns us against the sublime; like Jameson's sublime ("infinity"), Rorty's sublime creates two kinds of danger. The more obvious and immediate kind confronts other scriptors. If the liberal ironist in a flush of inspiration forgets that the glistening new vocabulary is just another provisional vocabulary, just one description among many, he or she may discount all other descriptions, may even repudiate them--and thus repudiate their purveyors, the custodians and commissars of the extant vocabulary. "Redescription often humiliates," Rorty writes (EHO 90). "Inherited contingencies" may be restrictive ones, but clearly it is kinder to observe them than to reject them outright. Those who maintain their own set of appearances may suffer when another's sense of the "real" is wielded against them; the sadder case would involve youthful or underprivileged scriptors, those whose sense of autonomy is so fragile that it could easily be suppressed or obliterated by an imperialist self-creator. The other and more insidious danger is the one sublimity poses to the self rather than the other, the danger simply of missing out on life. Like anyone who, nerving herself against crises, "prepares" a self against eventualities, Rorty's liberal ironist runs the risk of missing opportunities for creative engagement, "romance," those "great chances of beauty and adventure that the world offers" (261). The pursuit of autonomy may negate any possibility of novelty.

How does Margaret's advocacy of Tragedy occasion these two risks? Perhaps it does not: who would not prefer Tragedy to Squalor? But in preferring this mode Margaret tries to refashion Leonard's history. She appropriates it to her own ends; Leonard's ends simply disappear. Once she decks his arms with "narcissi, crimson-eyed and white" (261), her redescription may also seem equal parts lyricism and narcissism. In her grand image of Tragedy as a kind of Giant Form spanning time ("the sunset and the dawn") as well as space ("whose eyes are the stars"), the human form divine stands triumphant. But it stands in negation of the personal. When Helen laments her inability to remember Leonard as [her] lover," Margaret reproves her. "Forget him," she counsels. "Don't drag in the personal when it will not come" (267). But what suggests that the personal "will not come" in this case? Like Mary Pinkerton, one could accuse Forster himself of promoting Leonard's impersonalization, even of crafting it through the course of a number of late revisions. Forster and no one else has Leonard die (and thus become "horribly" impersonal [260]); he and no one else renders Jacky "so bestially stupid" that she has no personality to express (177). About their own demise Leonard and Jacky are not allowed to speak for themselves. Worse, what either member of this family would think of Margaret's imperative the reader is not encouraged to imagine.