The Truth of Uncertainity

In the last chapter of Walden, Henry David Thoreau relates a simple yet profound conviction: "Any truth is better than make-believe". Edward Galligan shares this conviction. He challenges the literary community to embrace truth, even the tentative truth, rather than make-believe in The Truth of Uncertainty: Beyond Ideology in Science and Literature.According to Galligan, the postmodern critic often fails to ask an important question when attempting to analyze and understand literature, namely, where is the evidence? Instead, the critic relies upon generalizations that ultimately lead away from the evidence or, more specifically, the text. In their attempts at originality, these critics lose sight of the literature that forms the very foundation of their literary discussions.The Truth of Uncertainty celebrates values commonly associated with the past era of criticism, but it applies these values to contemporary works in a series of fresh and unusual inquiries. Galligan employs texts commonly associated with the physical sciences, such as Gerald M. Edelman's Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind and Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics, that are rarely touched on by other critics of literature. The novelists whose works he discusses at length -- Josef Skvorecky, George V. Higgins, Mary Lee Settle, Robertson Davies, and Czeslaw Milosz -- are likewise rarely mentioned in contemporary criticism.As a consequence of dealing with these "unusual" texts, Galligan presents a refreshing interpretation of a number of important concepts: language is grounded in talk; all literary criticism is subjective and tentativebecause reading is a highly subjective enterprise; and, most important, the world is real and any truth is indeed better than make-believe. He moves from a rejection of criticism in the service of ideology to an affirmation of criticism in the service of truthfulness.The ideas celebrated in The Truth of Uncertainty are timeless and valuable. Galligan returns to the text and provides a penetrating critique of the state of contemporary criticism, which has abandoned truth for ideology. The result is an eloquent salute to literature itself.