BOOKS
467
Emma does make such tragic gestures of defiance, even though
Flaubert himself seems to want sometimes to pass off her moments
of tragic exhilaration as hysteria. Her speech to Rodolph after he has
spurned her appeal for help is, he insists, a lucid expression of true
vision; even her impulse towards suicide in the great scene at the
mansarde is an assertion of freedom as, perhaps, her actual suicide
is. Less "tragic," more "determined" in a fashion Flaubert could not
bear to envision, would have been her acceptance of further life.
James, Gervais believes, felt an
untragic
need to find consola–
tion in an acceptable death like Ralph Touchett's in
A Portrait of a
Lady.
It is only Flaubert whose gaze does not waver from the ultimate
humiliation which all must share. The critic gives the palm, there–
fore, to Flaubert, in whom the tension between determinism and
yearning for transcendence remains as a sort of "irate energy." "A
tragedy which nearly eschews tragic conflict by making the odds
against man too great was, perhaps, the truest way for tragic thought
to find expression in mid-nineteenth century France," he concludes,
and would also have been, he implies, the truest way for the ex–
patriated American writing in England.
MILLICENT BELL
DROPPING THE OBJECT
PHILOSOPHY AND THE MIRROR OF NATURE. By Richard Rorty.
Princeton University Press. $20.00.
CONSEQUENCES OF PRAGMATISM. By Richard Rorty.
University of
Minnesota Press. $29.50.
For the past three and a half centuries the central element
in Western philosophy has been epistemology, the theory of knowl–
edge in which the claims of various sorts of intellectual activity to
provide us with knowledge or reasonable belief are examined and
judged.
It
began with Descartes, who, winding himself up for a
metaphysics that would take account of the new science, turned
what he had meant to be an entrance hall into the main livingroom.
It
became explicit with Locke, who described himself as concerned
with "the nature, origin, extent, and certainty" of knowledge, and it
reached some kind of apogee with Kant. For some time after him,
