Nabokov's dismissal of "topical trash" and Orwell's rejection of "art for art’s sake" are criticized as attempts to excommunicate writings different from their own while perpetuating the moral-aesthetic contrast. Rorty brings together their contrasting claims about art by saying that there is no such thing as "the writer" or "the nature of literature" (we can instead ask, "What purposes does this book serve?"), and that the pursuit of private perfection, as well as serving human liberty, are both perfectly reasonable aims for writers with different gifts. He wants to stress their similarities, seeing them both as political liberals (like Proust and Derrida, unlike Nietzsche and Heidegger), and as having tried to get us inside cruelty, which in Orwell's case refers to the end of "1984", differing from his usual "topical trash", i.e. descriptions of cruelty from the outside.