The moral of the story: Exemplification and the literary work (original) (raw)

1980, Philosophical Studies

So in literature we have two (perhaps identical) syntactically articulate vocabularies, the terms of each taking the terms of the other as referents, with both of the resultant systems-the one a system of denotation, the other of exemplification-being syntactically articulate and semantically dense. Thus, even though a literary work is articulate and may exemplify or express what is articulate, endless search is always required here as in other arts to determine precisely what is exemplified or expressed. 1 This passage from Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art is not a paradigmatically obvious or even easily understandable description of the process of literary criticism or its result. Nevertheless I shall argue that, once explained, Goodman's description of the nature of the process of determining what a work of literature exemplifies or expresses offers a good account of a significant part of literary criticism. I will then argue that Goodman's account is quite surprisingly useful in describing the relation of a work of literature to its theme, thesis or 'message'. The element of surprise stems from the fact that if a work of literature is said to express or exemplify its 'message', 'moral' or theme in Goodman's sense, then determining that message is not a matter of ascertaining what the work denotes-its semantic properties-but of choosing a label which denotes it. This, I think, is just the opposite of what one would naturally expect. For purposes of explication we have to accept Goodman's specification of the object of literary criticism as the text, though not, I think, much of his metaphysical view about what a text is. What is important is that Goodman's identity criterion for a literary work ties it quite specifically to a group of words ordered in precisely one way, so that the text becomes in effect a selfinstantiating spelling rule. 2 From this criterion it follows that a reader whose book has a misprint has not, strictly speaking, read the work. Neither have readers of abridged editions or translations. But if this criterion seems excessively restrictive, the worst that can be said of it is that, in proposing it, Goodman has taken an extreme position at that end of a continuum where most theorists are grouped anyway. There is perhaps a heuristic argument