World-Making: The Literary Truth-Claim and the Interpretations of Texts

Alan Thomas is an associate professor of English at the University of
Toronto.

This book originated in a series of lectures at Queen’s University.
Its subject is the truth we find in literature, a different truth from
that of science but nonetheless an equally meaningful one. Valdés
follows the lead of Hans-Georg Gadamer (who made this claim for literary
truth three decades ago) and Paul Ricoeur.

Valdés carefully sets out his ground for examination: the literary
work as discourse and as text. He establishes five categories of
truth-claim for literary discourse: the empirical and the historical,
and those of verisimilitude, authority, and self. Throughout the
discussion that follows, Valdés subjects texts of considerable interest
to brief but sharply perceptive and revealing treatment. He examines,
for instance, Dylan Thomas’s exhortatory poem “And Death Shall Have
No Dominion” in relation to the truth-claim of verisimilitude (which
may make one think again about what “verisimilitude” can mean).
Kafka’s The Trial is the exemplary work he chooses to examine the
truth-claim of self (paradoxically, its presence he finds confirmed by
its absence).

John Fowles and Virginia Woolf provide other texts for examination,
though, of course, as authors, and in accordance with contemporary
theory, Valdés pays little attention to them. He thrusts the weight of
his attention onto the relationship between the text and the reader, and
establishes some interesting observations on how the reader is
“contextualized” and maneuvered into a position from which to
interpret the text. A reader of Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s
Woman, for instance, is “historicized,” that is, established as a
reader of the 1960s looking back on the world of the 1860s. Readers of
other texts are similarly edged into position to serve as assessors of
fact or moral values. It is the readers, then, who refigure or make the
“worlds” referred to in the title.

This is a useful book (written in plain language) on a complex subject.