Sparkle Valley as Redescription

Apr 21
3 min read

Updated: 4 days ago

How I think Richard Rorty might have read Sparkle Valley

The thing about literature, and Sparkle Valley is literature, is that it's open to interpretation. 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. 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. So ultimately, it's not whether Sparkle Valley, the magical world, is real in any literal or deep sense. That's kind of the wrong question to ask. It's more, what do these imaginative worlds make possible?

So looking at it this way, Rorty wouldn’t look at the magic in Sparkle Valley as some kind of supernatural power or anything like that. It's something much more interesting. It’s the human ability to redescribe, to create in ways that fear or structure or distraction (the Beast) can't stop.

So on this interpretation, and remember, this is just one interpretation, Abigail’s journey, and ultimate victory, isn't about proving that Sparkle Valley exists out there on some map or something. It's just about saying that the Beast, this force of nihilism, won't have the last word.

And we can think about the Blue Flower (another metaphor) that way too. It isn't some kind of Platonic ideal that hovers over everything. No, it's a living metaphor (and Rorty lived for metaphor) that helps us to recognize and expand our lives – our sense of beauty and joy and possibility. That’s enough. The Blue Flower doesn’t need a scientific explanation to be real.

And kids understand this. It isn’t about something being factually real — that’s the whole point of imagination. They love their toys and their make-believe because it’s meaningfully true.

So from this perspective, “growing up” has a whole different feel to it. In a Rorty interpretation, growing up isn't about leaving the world of make-believe for the real world, it's about not giving in to fear, and thereby becoming a more imaginative "storyteller.”

I always loved Rorty’s “thousand points of light.” He would talk about encouraging imagination and creativity—the idea that literature (art and metaphor) could generate not final truths or foundational truths, but rich and creative vocabularies. And looking at it this way, this is what Sparkle Valley is trying to do. The magic of Sparkle Valley is, to use Rorty's term, redescription. Maybe that is Abigail’s deepest mission: don’t let fear have the final word. And I like to think Rorty might have liked that.