Sparkle Valley as Redescription
Updated: 6 days ago
Everybody brings their own baggage and their own interpretation to a work of art. And so I've been thinking about how my old advisor, Richard Rorty, would look at Sparkle Valley. I obviously don't know and unfortunately, it's too late to find out since he passed away a number of years ago, but here's how I hope he would look at it.
I suspect that he would see it as some kind of imaginative “ironism.” And I'm not talking about irony in the cynical sense. When Rorty was talking about ironism, he was basically saying that the vocabulary we use is always open to change (and importantly that stories can change the world).
He loved metaphor, and he loved to redescribe the world in different ways. In that sense, I think he would see Sparkle Valley as a defense of imagination —not as an escape from reality, but as a "redescription" of reality.
And he would applaud Abigail’s fight to keep the Beast, this force of nihilism, from having the last word…
(An aside, his general humility and openness to new ideas always surprised me—never steering our conversations, only asking genuine questions, and offering clarification if I asked for it. A Grandma Doris quality in retrospect,)
Novalis:
We never discussed Novalis and the Blue Flower directly, but Rorty did say this:
"One may say of pragmatism what Novalis said of Romanticism, that it is 'the apotheosis of the future."
Like Novalis (minus the metaphysics), Rorty is looking forward in hope and embracing imagination—which is in line with Abigail's impossible choice at the very end to keep Emily's imagination alive and "the conversation open."
It's also consistent with the Blue Flower itself, a living metaphor that helps us to recognize and expand our lives – our sense of beauty and joy and possibility.
The magic of Sparkle Valley is, to use Rorty's term— redescription. Maybe that’s Abigail’s deepest mission: don’t let fear have the final word, And I like to think Rorty might have liked that.
