Last night I asked three questions and offered an answer to the second: why don't poets just ignore theory, especially postmodern theory? After not riding a bicycle for nearly two months, I rode 35 miles today, so I don't know how long I'll last, but tonight I'll try get through at least the first question, restated as "Just what is wrong with postmodern literary theory?" After all, I myself said that the basic insights are completely noncontroversial, and I don't really believe an entire intellectual program cannot be vitiated by a clever hoax — though it sure was fun to watch.
I'll start with just why those basic insights concerning language and experience are so uncontroversial: there's nothing new there, except a radical sense of alarm: what is it but Plato's cave? Did devout Christians or Jews or Moslems or Buddhists or Hindus believe they could plumb the infinite mind of deity? Could the most radical positivists ignore Hume's devastating attack on induction? What is the scientific method but an institutionalized defense against personal and cultural bias, a rigorous attempt to embrace the notion that it's possible to be wrong?
I can't explain why it suddenly seemed so urgent to some twentieth century writers. Perhaps it was that, for a few years in WWI, for the first time in nearly a century, the rate of deaths by violence approached pre-modern magnitudes. Perhaps it was the Holocaust, or the 30-year-long threat of nuclear annihilation.
I do know that, for the first time since we stopped thinking ourselves to be the favorites or the image of some god, there is substantial reason to believe that, flawed as we are, as incomplete as our understanding necessarily is, we are also necessarily damned good at figuring out those parts of the world, including other people, which can contribute to or detract from our well-being — in the fullest sense of that idea. We, our minds and languages, are the products of four-and-a-half billion years of evolution. So are tapeworms. And tapeworms are really good at being tapeworms.
I meant to do more tonight, but I am just exhausted. Thanks to Josh Corey for his considered response to last night's post. I will get to his points before I'm done with this.
9:04:48 PM 
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