I
Increasingly over the past few decades, as postmodern critical theories
have percolated from the academy down to the general culture, the
prestige of literature has declined. Vulgarized ideas from deconstruc-
tion and other postmodern schools now permeate the zeitgeist, spread-
ing the notion that words don’t refer to things, but exist in a
self-enclosed system divorced from the world. In classrooms and aca-
demic journals, literary texts are often treated as little more than tissues
of self-serving lies—or subtle snares set by culture and language to
entrap readers’ minds. A devotion to precise and memorable language
is considered either a quaint anachronism or dangerous resistance to a
liberatory new social scheme. Consequently, the new “unacknowledged
legislators of the world,” postmodern critics, often disdain traditional
poets and storytellers while lauding experimental writers who in
effect burn down their own houses to expose the sinister illusionism of
words.
The irony of the situation is that for all of their revolutionary postur-
ing, postmodern critical theories and the literary avant-garde are rooted
in a paradigm established more than three centuries ago by René
Descartes. Before it reached itsreductio ad absurdumin the linguistic
experiments of so-called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing, Jonathan
Swift satirized the absurd conclusions to which this method led. Now
that the arts have entangled themselves in the very absurdities Swift pre-
dicted, it is time to reassess the basic premises underlying them.
Fortunately, the foundation of a new paradigm is already being laid.
Though the news has not yet broken through to academic departments
of literature, this newly evolving paradigm gives support to common-
sense notions about the power of literary representation to illuminate
and transform human life. As the old model of language and thought
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The Enchanted Loom:
A New Paradigm for Literature
PAULLAKE
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