Glad To Have That Cleared Up

Always thrilling when big-time academics approve of me enjoying literature:

Garber appears to have changed her mind. She now insists that literature is irreducible. It is not a portal to something more important than literature. She celebrates “the non-’about’-ness of literature, its refusal to be grounded or compromised by referentiality.” “Literature is a first-order, not a second-order, phenomenon,” she writes, demolishing the pretensions of cognitive science, which claims to have found the master key that unlocks the cultural universe. “It is not simply a clever kind of code developed by the mind to ensure that we all possess a mental Rolodex of figures enabling the nimble linking and blending of commonly held thoughts. It does not merely frame concepts or conceptual metaphors in pleasing or memorable phrases. Language makes meaning, or rather, meanings; it does not merely reflect it.”

Do not approach books as if they need to be unmasked, Garber insists. Do not tell them to come out with their hands up. Do not reduce Proust to a series of talking points. Do not repackage Tolstoy as a self-help manual. “We do literature a real disservice if we reduce it to knowledge or to use, to a problem to be solved. If literature solves problems, it does so by its own inexhaustibility, and by its ultimate refusal to be applied or used even for moral good.”

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