Instrumentalism and the interpretation of narrative

This paper discusses the motivation underlying an instrumentalist conception of the retrieval of a literary narrative from the text that presents it. Focusing on the version of the doctrine recently advanced in Gregory Currie (1993), it argues that the advantages instrumentalism claims over the realism it seeks to displace are uncertainly based and cannot be made good. What would be needed to overcome obvious difficulties in its initial formulation would be a principled veil of ignorance occluding the actual author's mind from the competent reader. The imposition of such a veil cannot be adequately motivated. In consequence, the scepticism instrumentalism generates about criticism's traditional aspirations to objectivity in the form of uniquely correct reconstructions of its canonical narrative texts is found wanting. The literary nature of the narratives in which we have most interest itself imports an aesthetic norm of unity into their interpretation, and it thereby privileges a notion of successful understanding that is committed to the goal of uniquely correct retrieval. © Oxford University Press 1996.