The pesky unspecified pronoun, and Richard Rorty’s good irony, reconsidered

I’ve been writing an essay for an academic publication and am at that almost-done point. I’m copy-editing, going through and tweaking things, shaving off anything that feels redundant. Unhappily, I am stuck on this sentence:

The Romantic cult of the artist conflated the artist and their art, giving the artist themself permission to step out of the bounds of what is permitted in society.

I don’t like “themself”, even as I want to keep the italicized emphasis on the word. The idea is central to the essay. I encounter this problem regularly when writing, so I thought it would be interesting to parse it out. I’m thinking in particular, but not exclusively, of the essay-form, since that’s the article I need to finish, and also a lot of what I’ll be writing/reading here on Substack. I’m curious to hear other writers’ thoughts on this subject. Under discussion is the unspecified pronoun – the hypothetical human being in a situation the writer is describing. [1]

Here is the “old-fashioned” possibility for my sentence:

The Romantic cult of the artist conflated the artist and his art, giving the artist himself permission to step out of the bounds of what is permitted in society.

This was the practice in all writing, until around the middle of the 1980s, I am estimating, but I could be wrong – comments and clarifications are welcome. I am basing this middle 80s figure on the books I’ve read through the decades, when they were written, and when the various practices emerged and changed. In books from essayists up through most of the 20^th century, we find a male figure. Here is T.S. Eliot in his famous essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”:

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him for contrast and comparison, among the dead. [2]

The essay was written initially for the literary magazine, The Egoist, in 1919. Noteworthy is that The Egoist was founded by a feminist, English suffragette Dora Madsen. The magazine was at the forefront of Modernism in arts and letters in the five years of its publication. Nevertheless, the hypothetical poet T.S. Eliot envisions is male, period. Furthermore, if we “cannot value him alone” and must “set him for contrast and comparison, among the dead”, the tacit implication is that “the dead” are males as well. Poets have always been males, it seems, and ever shall be.

In 1920, the work of Emily Dickinson was gaining exposure (with more scholarly editions of her poetry slowing appearing in the decades to come, which did not mangle her genius by editing and adding capitalization and punctuation). Surely, as a poet, Eliot was aware of her, and possibly aware of the work of other female contemporaries who were gaining exposure, like Sara Teasdale or Louise Bogan. My point is not to speculate on Eliot’s own view towards women, but to remind us that from our perspective today, the dynamics are strange. In Eliot’s unqualified use of the male unspecified pronoun, he describes poetry as an exclusively male-club, even as he writes for a magazine championing modernism, started by a feminist.

This kind of dissonance – between the hypothetical description in an essay, and the reality in a world that was slowly inching towards a more egalitarian outlook between males and females – had to resolve itself. It would, but still persisted in the decades to come. Here is Lionel Trilling in the essay “Manners, Morals and the Novel”, written and delivered in 1947. The unspecified pronoun this time refers not to the poet or author, but to the reader. Speculating on the novel, he defines its function:

Its greatness and its practical usefulness lay in its unremitting work of involving the reader himself in the moral life, inviting him to put his own motives under examination, suggesting that reality is not as his conventional education has led him to see it. [3]

For us reading this today, we can’t avoid noticing the several male pronouns in the sentence. As much as I love the idea he’s expressing, it’s unsatisfying for me to read it – the person I am to imagine, who is invited into this examination through the act of reading, is exclusively male. To be clear: I am not weighing in on whether that Lionel Trilling thought that males were the only gender capable of this moral self-examination, (I doubt it) or that T.S. Eliot had no regard for female poets (I like to think not, but don’t know). This was simply the practice. What would be the way forward, though?

In my early 20s I discovered the American philosopher, Richard Rorty. He would have big impact on me, in terms of developing my own political standpoint.

In his 1989 book Contingency, irony and solidarity, he laid out some of his most enduring ideas, and presented us with a model political person, someone he calls an “ironist”. When I read this book, I was intrigued upon encountering a new unspecified pronoun for the first time – a female one:

On my own definition an ironist cannot get along without the contrast between the final vocabulary she inherited and the one she is trying to create for herself. Irony is, if not intrinsically resentful, at least reactive. Ironists have to have something to have doubts about, something from which to be alienated. [4]

I was intoxicated by Rorty’s writing on irony. It had implications for me as an artist-under-formation, and Contingency, irony and solidarity was instrumental in developing my own understanding of a liberal politics. In defining a “liberal”, Rorty paraphrased his contemporary, philosopher Judith Shklar. Throughout her work, Shklar maintained, in simple and unapologetic terms, that “liberals are the people who think that cruelty is the worst thing we do”. [5] In the forward to his book, Rorty previewed the figure he wished to promote, someone he called a “liberal ironist”:

I use “ironist” to name the sort of person who faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires – someone sufficiently historicist and nominalist to have abandoned the idea that those central beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach of time and chance. Liberal ironists are people who include among these ungroundable desires their own hope that suffering will be diminished, that the humiliation of human beings by other human beings may cease. [6]

Rorty’s ideas appealed to me because they seemed to have more direct political application than those from some of the other philosophers I was just beginning to discover. He was aware of a penchant in philosophy to retreat from the real world into metaphysical speculation. This was probably a response to the academic environment around him, which, throughout 1980s, was still under the sway of Heidegger.