Ethics in Culture: The Dissemination of Values through Literature and Other Media (Spectrum Literaturwissenschaft Spectrum Literature)

Ethics in Culture

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spectrum Literaturwissenschaft / spectrum Literature Komparatistische Studien / Comparative Studies

Herausgegeben von / Edited by Angelika Corbineau-Hoffmann · Werner Frick

Wissenschaftlicher Beirat / Editorial Board Sam-Huan Ahn · Peter-Andre´ Alt · Aleida Assmann · Francis Claudon Marcus Deufert · Wolfgang Matzat · Fritz Paul · Terence James Reed Herta Schmid · Simone Winko · Bernhard Zimmermann Theodore Ziolkowski

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Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

Ethics in Culture The Dissemination of Values through Literature and Other Media Edited by Astrid Erll, Herbert Grabes, and Ansgar Nünning in Collaboration with Simon Cooke, Anna-Lena Flügel, Meike Hölscher, and Jan Rupp

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

앝 Printed on acid-free paper which falls within 앪 the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ethics in culture : the dissemination of values through literature and other media / edited by Astrid Erll, Herbert Grabes, Ansgar Nünning ; in collaboration with Simon Cooke, Anna-Lena Flügel, Meike Hölscher, Jan Rupp. p. cm. ⫺ (Literaturwissenschaft/spectrum literature) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-3-11-020072-0 (alk. paper) 1. Literature and morals. I. Erll, Astrid. II. Grabes, Herbert. III. Nünning, Ansgar. PN49.E844 2008 8011.3⫺dc22 2008008568

ISBN 978-3-11-020072-0 ISSN 1860-210X Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. 쑔 Copyright 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in Germany Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin

Acknowledgements The editors would like to express their gratitude to the institutions and individuals who have made the appearance of this volume possible, first and foremost among these being the Collaborative Research Center on “Memory Cultures” (University of Giessen), the Giessener Hochschulgesellschaft (Giessen University/Alumni Society), the Erwin Stein Foundation, and the Giessener Graduiertenzentrum Kulturwissenschaften (Giessen Graduate Center for the Study of Culture). All were instrumental in bringing together a number of colleagues from Germany and abroad in May 2006 for a colloquium on the present topic at the conference center of Justus Liebig University’s ‘chateau’ at Rauischholzhausen. Our thanks also go to the participants in the colloquium who agreed to having their contribution appear in this volume, as well as to all those others who further contributed to it. Warmest thanks, too, to those who helped prepare the manuscript for publication, above all Gordon Collier and Simon Cooke, who took care of the language side of things, and Anna-Lena Flügel, Meike Hölscher, and Jan Rupp, who spent considerable time and energy on formatting the text. Giessen, December 2007 Astrid Erll, Herbert Grabes, and Ansgar Nünning

Table of Contents HERBERT GRABES

Introduction ……………………………………………………………1 I. Theory Supported by History ANGELA LOCATELLI

Literature’s Versions of Its Own Transmission of Values …………….. 19 HERBERT GRABES

Being Ethical: Open, Less Open, and Hidden Dissemination of Values in English Literature .………………………………………. 35 MARSHALL BROWN

Transcendental Ethics, Vertical Ethics, and Horizontal Ethics ……….. 51 RONALD SHUSTERMAN

Agrammaticality, Silence and the Diffusion of Values: The Holiday of Language ……………………………………………………………... 73 PHILIPP WOLF

Beyond Virtue and Duty: Literary Ethics as Answerability …………… 87 WOLFGANG G. MÜLLER

An Ethical Narratology …………………………………………….... 117 BIRGIT NEUMANN

What Makes Literature Valuable: Fictions of Meta-Memory and the Ethics of Remembering .……………………………………. 131 SIMON COOKE

“Unprofitable Excursions”: On the Ethics of Empathy in Modernist Discourses on Art and Literature …………………………………… 153 HUBERT ZAPF

Narrative, Ethics, and Postmodern Art in Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved ………………………………………………………..... 171

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WOLFGANG HALLET

Can Literary Figures Serve as Ethical Models? ………………………. 195 JÜRGEN SCHLAEGER

The Ethical Dimension of Cognitive Poetics and “A Mechanism of Sensibility” ………………………………………………………….. 217 II. History Inspiring Theory ASTRID ERLL

Ethics in Stone: The Architecture of the Raj ……………………….... 231 ANSGAR NÜNNING, JAN RUPP

The Dissemination of Imperialist Values in Late Victorian Literature and Other Media ..………………………………………………….... 255 MARGIT SICHERT

Prominent Values in Nineteenth-Century Histories of English Literature ……………………………………………….... 279 MAX SAUNDERS

Impressionism, Fiction, and the Location of the Ethical ……………. 299 ANNETTE SIMONIS

Ethics and Aesthetics in Modern Literature and Theory: A Paradoxical Alliance? ………………….………………………….. 317 BJÖRN MINX

Literature and Ethics: Social Critique and Morality in the American War II Novel ……………………………………………………...… 337 SUSANA ONEGA

The Nightmare of History, the Value of Art and the Ethics of Love in Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters …………...… 355 VERA NÜNNING

Ethics and Aesthetics in British Novels at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century ……………………………………………….. 369 Notes on Contributors ……………………………...………………. 393

HERBERT GRABES (GIESSEN)

Introduction One of the most fascinating phenomena one encounters in the study of culture is the balancing out of extreme theoretical positions. With hindsight, one might think that some kind of crisis management had taken place, though the only truth we can rely on is the ineradicable heterogeneity of trends in the various areas of the academy and in intellectual life at large. A rather stunning example was the return of an ethical discourse at the very moment when postmodern anti-foundationalist thought as well as the theoretical dissolution of the subject seemed to be having disastrous consequences for any attempt to justify any kind of ethics. If culture at large and all of its components could now be considered as not much more than mere constructs, and if the Cartesian notion of the subject could be replaced by that of warring desires which were themselves simply casualties of cultural determination and subjection, then there was no longer any foundation for binding moral obligations nor any basis for the exercise of individual responsibility. Yet though the consequences of such conceptual play were as socially unacceptable as its theoretical basis was epistemologically self-invalidating, philosophers who, in the 1980s, brought ethical thought back into focus did not even bother to protest at the postmodern assumptions undercutting them. Instead, they simply bypassed them by leaving behind moral rules and obligations and the problem of justifying them and turned to the actually premodern, yet now freshly urgent question: “What shall I do to lead a good life?” With this radical change of direction from an ethics of prohibitions to an ethics of moral guidance, observable with philosophers like Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue, Bernard Williams in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, and Martha Nussbaum in The Fragility of Goodness and Love’s Knowledge, not only pre-modern conceptions of ethics, above all that of Aristotle’s Nicomachian Ethics, but also literary worldmaking as a domain of concrete representations of human agency that was beyond any epistemological or ontological strictures, became immensely attractive. This highlighting of literature, especially of literary narrative, as a field of demonstration and testing ground for responsible and rewarding human behavior that was even superior to the abstract argumentation of the ethical discourse of philosophy, was also taken up by other influential

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philosophers like Charles Taylor (in Sources of the Self) and Richard Rorty (in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity). And soon literary critics like Wayne Booth (in The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction), Frank Palmer (in Literary and Moral Understanding), David Parker (in Ethics, Theory and the Novel), Adam Zachary Newton (in Narrative Ethics) and Colin McGinn (in Ethics, Evil, and Fiction) were intent on displaying the value of literature as a means of moral guidance. What seemed inimical to such a view was, of course, the already mentioned poststructuralist position, in particular the then fashionable deconstructionist mode of reading. Prescient of an imminent ethical turn, Hillis Miller had already, in 1987, written an Ethics of Reading in order to show that, albeit far from promoting traditional morality, a deconstructionist reading could with good reason be considered ethical, but with a new twist. In so doing, he gained support in the 1990s from such theorists as Drucilla Cornell (The Philosophy of the Limit), Christopher Norris (Truth and the Ethics of Criticism), and Geoffrey Harpham (Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society), and in particular by those who drew on the ethical insights of Emmanuel Levinas. This latter group includes Robert Eaglestone (Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas), Andrew Gibson (Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas), and Jill Robbins (Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature). What is most important about the latter is their distinction between ethics and morality, according to which the former acts as a “kind of play within morality, holds it open, hopes to restrain it from violence or the will to domination, subjects it to a kind of auto-deconstruction” (Gibson 15). The revival of Levinas’s ethics had, however, already begun earlier, with Richard Kearney’s Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers, the publication of important works by Levinas in English translation (above all Ethics and Infinity and Time and the Other), Paul Ricoeur’s Soi-même comme un autre, the critical anthology Re-Reading Levinas edited by Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley, Simon Critchley’s The Ethics of Deconstruction, and Zygmunt Bauman’s Postmodern Ethics. The 1990s also saw the appearance of critical anthologies presenting more variegated views, such as Commitment in Reflection: Essays in Literature and Moral Philosophy (ed. Leona Toker), The Ethics in Literature (eds. Andrew Hadfield et al.), Critical Ethics: Text, Theory and Responsibility (eds. Dominic Rainsford and Tim Woods), and Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture and Literary Theory (eds. Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack). Of special significance are essay collections that signaled a revival of the venerable debate concerning the vexed relationship between ethics and aesthetics—two paradigms, each claiming absolute autonomy: Ethics and Aesthetics: The Moral Turn of Postmodernism (eds. Gerhard Hoffmann and Alfred Hornung), Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection (ed. Jerrold

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Levinson) and the like. It should not be forgotten, either, that the aesthetic event plays an important role in Alain Badiou’s L’éthique: Essai sur la conscience du Mal of the same period. While the ethical aspect had been an important feature of feminism and gender studies right from the start, Luce Irigaray’s focus on this aspect in An Ethics of Sexual Difference indicated that the ethical turn had also reached this domain of inquiry. How strong and persistent this turn has actually been is borne out by the steady flow of relevant publications that set in at the turn of the millennium, the more general of these including Anthony Cunningham’s The Heart of What Matters: The Role of Literature in Moral Philosophy, a special issue of the European Journal of English Studies on Ethics and Literature edited by Robert Eaglestone, the publication of a panel on “Literature and Value—Interpretation, Ethics and Aesthetics” at the ESSE conference 2002 in Ranam 36, and Stephen K. George’s Ethics, Literature, Theory: An Introductory Reader. What the new century brought with it was an increasingly intense focus on particular authors and works in investigations of the relationship between ethics and literature. A start was made by Christina Kotte in Ethical Dimensions in British Historiographic Metafiction: Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, Penelope Lively, and there followed Derek Attridge’s J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, Dagmar Krause’s Timothy Findley’s Novels between Ethics and Postmodernism, Barbara Schwerdtfeger’s Ethics in Postmodern Fiction: Donald Barthelme and William Gass, and Ann Katrin Jonsson’s Relations. Ethics and the Modernist Subject in James Joyce’s “Ulysses”, Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves” and Djuna Barnes’s “Nightwood”. Although broader aspects of culture were taken into consideration in many of the aforementioned studies of the relation between ethics and literature, it is noticeable that by the mid-1990s the ethical turn was also beginning to affect cultural theory, a discipline of increasing importance thanks to the increasingly central role played by the notion of “culture” in the humanities. Works illustrative of this shift of focus include Samuel Fleischacker’s The Ethics of Culture, Keith Tester’s Media, Culture, and Morality and Moral Culture, Bernard T Adeney’s Strange Virtues: Ethics in a Multicultural World, Rey Chow’s Ethics After Idealism: Theory, Culture, Ethnicity, Reading, and the critical anthology edited by Jozef Keulartz et al., Pragmatist Ethics for a Technological Culture. *

In view of this array of like-minded publications from the past few decades, one might ask what further contributions of value can be made. One thing is clear: there are investigations of the relation between ethics and literature (what literature can do for ethics or vice versa), and investigations of the relation between ethics and culture, but these have so far been mostly kept apart, with the result that the importance of literature and

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other media for the dissemination of ethical values within a culture has not yet been duly acknowledged and submitted to scrutiny. This is a situation the following critical essays aim to change. Approaching the topic of “Ethics in Culture” from various angles, as it does, the present volume may give a better idea of how ethical values are disseminated throughout a culture via literature and other media—certainly in more distinct and perhaps more efficient ways than through direct proselytising. As the essays are to be considered as variations on a common theme, there will inevitably be some degree of arbitrariness in their disposition; nevertheless, an attempt has been made to distinguish between those articles in which the reader is likely find general tenets being supported by historical examples and those in which, vice versa, closer examination of one or more historical examples has led to theoretical conclusions. Commencing with the quite general observation that “by taking language to its limits, literature takes us to the level of the ultimate questions of being human in the world,” ANGELA LOCATELLI in her essay “Literature’s Versions of Its Own Transmission of Values” shows the extent to which expectations regarding the ethical function of literature have changed since the Renaissance. While in the sixteenth century the “means and end” of literature were seen in its “conceptual and moral orthodoxy,” the Romantic period is characterized by Shelley’s affirmation of the “morality of the imagination, i.e. the concept of empathy.” In the contemporary situation, Locatelli argues, it has become increasingly important for “the exercise of interpretation which literature intrinsically involves” to act as “a good antidote against both fundamentalism and pragmatism.” As to the specific ethical function of literature, this “foregrounds the workings of language in the processes of subjectivization” and therefore “transmits values also by providing a convincing memory of time-specific subjectivities. In other words, literature may well be the richest archive of extinct subjects, but indeed also the non-foundational ground of the manifold possibilities of endlessly articulating the subject.” In the first section of my own contribution, “Being Ethical: Open, Less Open and Hidden Dissemination of Values in English Literature,” I endeavor to show how the postmodern anti-foundationalist position has led moral philosophers to “use literature […] as a prime source of examples and an educational medium of moral behavior,” thus prompting many literary theorists and critics to feel the need to justify postmodern literary works that are seemingly devoid of any ethical aspect. In view of the highlighting of the readers’ share in the construction of textual meaning, it seemed in any case to be “quite risky to attribute to works of literature an actual ethical impact.” However, the dissemination of values is

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another matter, and it is hardly in dispute that values of various kinds are directly or covertly spread by literature. Nor will it be denied that the literary rhetoric of persuasion may well be more effective than moral preaching. What, in the second part of my essay, I choose to cast in doubt is the widely shared assumption that the ethical aspect of a literary work is better concealed, because it would otherwise do harm to its quality. As a survey of classical texts of English literature reveals, a large number of the betterknown works to which we ascribe a high aesthetic quality present ethical values quite openly. And if we add those cases in which a dissemination of values occurs somewhat less openly, yet in a still discernible way, it can be said that “works that have to offer much in terms of both prodesse and delectare have generally best stood the test of time.” The aim of MARSHALL BROWN in his essay “Transcendental Ethics, Vertical Ethics, and Horizontal Ethics” is “to draw from literary representations some visions to concretize the ethical encounter, to bring the discussion back from the beyond.” For this purpose, not only “transcendental ethics” but also what he calls “horizontal ethics,” the terrain of “the crucial problems of justice and survival” in an age of globalization, seems too far removed from “vertical ethics,” “the practices needed to live in harmony with those who live exactly where you live.” Because “literary works offer us countless examples of the operations of the vertical in the ethical domain,” Brown recommends “turning from the abstract maxims of moral and political philosophy to the imagined specifics of literary representations.” This contention is then demonstrated by an interpretation of relevant passages from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Henrik Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman, and Kafka’s The Trial, as well as by an investigation of the multiple function of staircases in works by various authors. RONALD SHUSTERMAN, in his contribution “Agrammaticality, Silence and the Diffusion of Values: The Holiday of Language,” uses some Wittgensteinian positions to refine a “theory of the connections between agrammaticality or incorrection and the ethical or metaethical dimension of literature.” Taking together Wittgenstein’s view that “philosophy ought really be written only as poetic composition,” I.A. Richards’s maxim that “All thinking is classification—all thought is sorting,” the observation that “for some time now, art has been more concerned with de-classification,” and the well-known fact that free will, though indispensable not only for ethics, is “a problem, a paradox,” Shusterman comes to the conclusion that this quite generally means that “the work of art is a metaethical experience of the forms of judgement and value”—“in all cases we are being asked to interpret and thus in all cases we are being made both to exercise and to experience our problematic freedom of choice,” and it is “perhaps at this

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metaethical level, during this conscious experience of the nature of judgement and choice, that ethics and aesthetics are one.” PHILIPP WOLF’s contribution, “Beyond Virtue and Duty: Literary Ethics as Answerability” deals with the “hiatus between autonomy and heteronomy” as it “comes to the fore in self-reflexive postmodern culture” and “much of contemporary criticism.” He first demonstrates that “all major contributions to literary ethics revolve around […] emotive exemplum theory” and concludes that it may be more appropriate to develop a “weak” form of literary ethics, in view of the fact that “moral norms and ethical behavior are only possible rather than necessary options in modern Western culture.” This decision in favor of a “modest or normatively weak approach” leads him to three concrete alternative suggestions regarding the ethical in the experience of literature: the first is “responsive dialogue,” in which a “reader responds to an unheard-of and singular literary experience”; the second is “the mnemonic function, the mnemonic and historical responsiveness to literature and its belated readers”; and the third is “a responsive self-contemplation” that is “mainly confined to the lyrical mode.” WOLFGANG G. MÜLLER’S paper “An Ethical Narratology” is grounded on the hypothesis that narrative technique and point-of-view can have profound ethical implications. Strategies of mediating moral values and alerting readers to moral issues and problems will be related to basic modes of narration such as (1) authorial narration with an omniscient narrator, which provides a moral orientation for the reader through comment and reflection, (2) point-of-view narration, which makes it the reader’s task to decode the moral qualities of characters and actions, and (3) I-narration which, depending on the text’s subject-matter, confronts the reader with a narrator’s attitude to the moral quality of characters and deeds committed or witnessed. Texts used for exemplification are English and American novels from the eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries. The aim of BIRGIT NEUMANN in her reflections on “What Makes Literature Valuable: Fictions of Meta-Memory and the Ethics of Remembering” is “to show that what makes literature valuable in terms of its ethical dimension is not exclusively its content, but its aesthetic means of presenting that content.” Convinced of the cultural relativity of values, she proposes “an ethics which couples the perpetuation of values and ethically meaningful closure with a self-conscious reflection of the process of evaluation or value-making.” Likewise, suspecting that a content-based ethics of remembering might be “begging the question of which and whose past is being remembered,” she suggests that “an ethics of remembering should be construed as a self-reflexive one, confronting seemingly mimetic representations of the past with the conditions of their creation.”

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In order to demonstrate how literature can be ethical in this sense, she analyses in detail Joy Kogawa’s Obasan and Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family as two “metamnemonic novels”—novels that in an extraordinary way “call for participation in the process of projecting meaning” and thereby “reinforce our awareness of the interpretative practices and concomitant values, biases, predispositions and epistemological habits and require us to take responsibility for the ones we endorse.” SIMON COOKE’S article offers a re-consideration of a concept that has held a prominent position in recent debates about ethics within culture— empathy—and brings into question both the ‘ethics of empathy’ itself and the privileged role literary form is often accorded in promoting and developing the empathetic capacity. Taking its cue from the relatively recent import of the word itself into the English language as a translation of the German word Einfühlung (via German visual aesthetics in the early twentieth century), “Unprofitable Excursions”: On the Ethics of Empathy in Modernist Discourses on Art and Literature,” stresses the concept’s intermedial, and distinctly Modern, roots. Drawing parallels between the critique of the aesthetic “urge to empathy” made in art historian Wilhelm Worringer’s influential study of Western and non-Western art, Abstraction and Empathy (1908), and Virginia Woolf’s meditation on the ethics of sympathy in her essay On Being Ill (1926), he argues that “‘empathy’ entered the English language as a term in visual aesthetics just as the concept itself came into crisis in the personal, social and cultural sense in which we use it today.” HUBERT ZAPF begins his article on “Narrative, Ethics, and Postmodern Art in Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved” with a survey of the return to ethics ‘after postmodernism’ which reveals a “new attention to the relationship of texts to concrete, biographically embedded subjects and to the wider context of the inter-subjective life-world.” He finds that “the following points have found special attention: (1) the ways in which the narrative mode is necessary to provide a medium for the concrete exemplification of ethical issues […]; (2) the ways in which narrative literature […] reflects the indissoluble connection between ethics and the human subject […]; (3) the ways in which the imaginative staging of other lives in fictional texts provides a forum for the enactment of the dialogical interdependence between self and other […], and (4), the ways in which literature and art […] are symbolic representations of complex life processes […].” Hustvedt’s novel, which is “set very much in the context of such questions,” is interpreted in some detail; What I Loved is particularly well pitched to make readers aware of the kind of ethical stance Martha Nussbaum has called “Love’s Knowledge”; a novel about art as a medium, it is,

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“because of its aesthetic defamiliarization and uncontrollable imaginative dynamics,” “successful in triggering cathartic effects.” In dealing with the question “Can Literary Figures Serve as Ethical Models?” WOLFGANG HALLET starts from the widely shared assumption that “literary figures can be regarded as particularly powerful factors in the communication of ethical orientation between the text and the reader.” He then uses the concept of the “mental model” as developed by cognitive psychology to interpret “literary figures as mental models constructed by the reader” and to show how this conception can be considered as “the decisive link between the textual data and structures available in the narrative text and possible effects that these may have on the reader’s mind.” Literary figures can influence our own ethical model (as a “subjective theory of why people behave in certain ways and of ‘how one should live’”) because “the construction of an ethical model is a complex interplay of real life experiences, elements from mental models of literary figures and simulations (‘fictions’) of the mental model itself.” Yet Hallet also points out that such a transfer must not be considered as an automatism; “we are free to incorporate literary figures in our ethical models or to deny them access to our minds.” Beginning with the allusion to T.S. Eliot’s remark about the “dissociation of sensibility” contained in his essay-title, “The Ethical Dimension of Cognitive Poetics and ‘A mechanism of sensibility,’” JÜRGEN SCHLAEGER deals with the redress of that seventeenth-century imbalance through metaphysical poetry and the particular workings of the human brain it stimulates. Surprisingly, it was Eliot who hinted at this connection long before the more recent investigations of brain function. What these inquiries have revealed is the fact that “blending, i.e., the use of metaphorical constructions, is […] central to any act of cognition. And to keep our mental apparatus in optimal shape is […] not merely a matter of aesthetics, but also of the adaptability and viability of value systems, of ethics.” It is then suggested that metaphysical poetry with its daring metaphors was “an answer to cultural processes that required radical rearrangements of the cognitive apparatus.” Looking at the subsequent attempt of Augustan poetry “to bring […] a highly complex world picture under ideological and aesthetic control,” and at “the Romantic Revolution […] as a cognitively necessary counterstrategy against the limitations of the Augustan project,” Schlaeger concludes: “the sequence of cognitive experiments we have seen unfolding through the centuries is not haphazard, but there is some logic behind the seeming confusion.” In her essay “Ethics in Stone: The Architecture of the Raj,” ASTRID ERLL uses the colonial situation in nineteenth-century India to discuss the relationship between ethics and architecture, showing “how an ‘ethics of

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architecture’ became an integral part of the imperial project in the nineteenth century, how the British translated architectural style into ethical considerations and from there into power politics.” The link between ethics and architecture is already visible in the title of a lecture on the “Deteriorative Power of Indian Art and Architecture” that John Ruskin gave in 1858 at the Kensington Museum, and the fact that this was in the year after the “Indian Mutiny” also brings in the aspect of power politics. It is shown how the British interpreted the hybrid Lakhnavi architecture that was part of the rich nawabi culture of Lucknow, the center of the Indian Mutiny,” as a symbol of the “degenerate” nawabi court. After they had destroyed Lucknow early in 1858, they created the so-called IndoSaracenic Style, “a mixture of Hindu and Muslim architectural forms with European elements” designed to express the imperial ideology. The final question in the context of this volume, “What can literary theory contribute to an understanding of the ethical function of architecture?” leads to the suggestion that it is “the reception-oriented idea of an “ethical experience.” Focusing on what have been called metaphors of empire, ANSGAR NÜNNING and JAN RUPP examine the dissemination of imperialist values in late Victorian literature and other media. They demonstrate how these metaphors, which describe the relationship between England and her colonies, not only assert the otherwise elusive unity of the British Empire, but to that end also articulate a range of highly normative values. Metaphors of empire, most notably that of the “Empire as a family,” are found in a wide range of literary and other genres and media, such as poetry, travel literature, political speeches, history writing, and journalism. As a result of the ubiquitous family metaphor, and in accordance with the bourgeois ideals of the Victorian age, imperialist values are mainly family values. Combining approaches from colonial discourse analysis, the study of metaphor, and the history of mentalities, the article reviews the most popular metaphors of empire and the dominant values they inscribe, such as loyalty (to the mother-country), respect for authority, restraint of the individual (colony), etc. It goes on to explore the functions of the metaphors of empire, which consist not only in conceptualizing and legitimizing the unity of the Empire. While concealing the issue of domination, metaphors of empire also seek to condition, not least on the part of the colonies, certain ethical imperatives and obligations in order to ensure the Empire’s future. In her essay “Prominent Values in Nineteenth-Century Histories of English Literature,” MARGIT SICHERT shows how literary histories were used to disseminate values, above all those of the glory and sanctity of the nation. This does not mean that all literary historians focus on the same

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aspects and promote the same values: the literary heritage is at one time meant to help rescue national unity in a situation of crisis, at another to demonstrate the superiority of England abroad or to stress at home its moral force for the shaping of a glorious future. It becomes evident that Englishness is considered as a value in itself, though again it is held to consist in a variety of features such as love of nature, the risking of grand designs, the proud spirit of liberty, or a deep religious orientation. As there is no hesitation about speaking of a specific English genius, especially regarding “men rising from the lower classes of citizens,” it is less surprising that aesthetic values can be acknowledged despite strong emphasis on the moral power of literature. The observation that nineteenth-century historians wrote for, and touched, the common reader, leads to the question of whether literary histories of our own time, though understandably less nationalistic, should not have “a more human touch.” Writing about “Impressionism, Fiction, and the Location of the Ethical,” MAX SAUNDERS explores “a kind of literature [...] which sets its face against value-judgements.” What he understands by “literary Impressionism” is a surprising configuration of authors “who all share a commitment to avoiding explicit moral commentary or judgement in their writing”— Flaubert, Turgenev, James, Chekhov, Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, D.H. Lawrence, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. Proceeding from the question of “why authorial judgement might detract from fictional narrative,” he is led to an inquiry into why the distinction between telling and showing emerged in the nineteenth century, and suggests that the turn to showing “can be seen as a counterpart in aesthetics to agnosticism,” a sign of “resistance to political coercion,” and an expression of the conviction that art should be autonomous. It is then asked “how it is that literature which privileges ‘showing’ might nevertheless have an ethical dimension”; employing arguments put forward by Lawrence and Ford, Saunders demonstrates that showing even “enables a more complex, responsible moral judgement” and that Impressionism was able “to achieve a greater ethical plenitude.” ANNETTE SIMONIS begins her essay “Ethics and Aesthetics in Modern Literature and Theory: A Paradoxical Allowance” with an expression of astonishment about the fact that the bestselling author Dan Brown took some of the ethical implications of his novel The Da Vinci Code quite seriously; ever since late nineteenth-century aestheticism, this has been the exception. By subsequently reminding us of the difference between Sir Philip Sidney’s sixteenth-century conviction in his Defence of Poesy that poetry has a moral aspect and Shelley’s romantic view that a “creative imagination is an essential precondition of moral judgement and sensibility,” she draws attention to the fact that the “romantic concepts of intensity

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and poetic imagination deliberately cross the boundaries between the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of the reader’s mental response and cognition.” Further developments reveal that, ever since Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Oscar Wilde, “polyphony, multiple perspectives and ambiguity […] exclude the transmission of a stable, normative set of values,” and that in Wilde’s works especially and “in modern literature on the whole the ethical dimension, if present at all, is inscribed into the texts in an indirect way, as a latent form, which is to be discovered by the reader. According to theorists and critics like Adorno, Foucault and Greenblatt the latent ethical perspectives are expressed through dissidence, negativity, or absence.” In the first part of his essay “Literature and Ethics: Social Critique and Morality in the American World War II Novel,” BJÖRN MINX explores the relationship between literature and ethics on the basis of moral philosophy and deals with the question of “why implicit strategies for the dissemination of values are preferable to explicit ones.” The specific value of literature for ethics is seen in the “intense scrutiny of particulars” (Martha Nussbaum), which “helps us to finely adjust universal and sometimes conflicting moral principles to specific contexts,” and in the “participative emotion” (Richard Rorty) that has the effect that “narratives are much more disarming than is moralizing.” Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 are taken as examples of war novels which, via a mass-reading public, may even have been able to influence the collective value-system of American society. Minx’s analysis thus focuses not only on the particular values that are indirectly communicated (which show “a clear movement in the value hierarchy between 1948 and 1969”) but also on the strategies used to manipulate the readers’ reactions. SUSANA ONEGA’s contribution, “The Nightmare of History, the Value of Art and the Ethics of Love in Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters,” begins with the insight that a prestigious highlighting of one aspect of a work of art can lead not only to the neglect but even to the suppression of other aspects. Thus the prevalent view that Barnes’s History of the World is above all a “witty and playful historiographic metafiction, inspired by an extreme form of postmodernist relativism” is shown to have hindered full recognition of the ethical potential of the novel. What a close and historically contextualized reading of the novel is able to reveal is the fact that “the fragmentariness and palimpsestic structure of A History of the World, its assumption of various narrative masks and voices and its playful parodying of literary genres, is then ideologically and ethically significant, a symptom of the inadequacy of traditional novelistic forms to represent trauma.” Beyond this mimetic aspect there is at

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the center a plea for love, love that “won’t change the history of the world” but will “teach us to stand up to history.” Barnes’s novel, in both its postmodern fragmentariness and its adoption of a clear moral stance, is held to prove that “thinking absolutism and relativism together” is possible and necessary (Connor). Convinced that “the experience of alterity is important” but that “it should be related to life-like characters, with whom one can have sympathy,” VERA NÜNNING, in her essay “Ethics and Aesthetics in British Novels at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century,” appears to be greatly in favor of what she finds in these novels regarding ethics. They fulfill these expectations and thus may be considered as “moving towards an ‘ethics of alterity.’” In order to substantiate this view, some recent novels are investigated more closely. In Julian Barnes’s Arthur and George, it is shown, alterity is produced by various narrational strategies which put in doubt the truth of fictional facts, while sympathy is evoked for the partly victimized characters. Nick Hornby in A Long Way Down “evokes the experience of alterity only to meliorate it and to induce sympathy for the other, thus turning unreliable narration into a powerful vehicle for ethics,” while in Zoë Heller’s novel Notes on a Scandal “indeterminacy results in an ethical instability which questions the very possibility of judging others.” Finally it is held that the combination of an alterity created by an innovative use of modernist and realist narrative technique with a “realist evocation of sympathy with life-like characters” leads to an “ethically viable aesthetic.”

References Adeney, Bernard T. Strange Virtues: Ethics in a Multicultural World. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1995. Antor, Heinz. “The Ethics of Criticism in the Age after Value”. Why Literature Matters: Theories and Functions of Literature. Eds. Rüdiger Ahrens and Laurenz Volkmann. Heidelberg: Winter, 1996. 65-85. Attridge, Derek, Herbert Grabes, Christina Kotte and Ronald Shusterman. “Aesthetic Issues in Ethical Criticism”. Ranam 36.1 (2003): 27-28. —: J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004. Badiou, Alain. L’ethique. Essai sur la conscience du Mal. Paris: Hatier, 1993. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. London: Verso, 2002. Bauman, Zygmunt. Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. Bernasconi, Robert, and Simon Critchley, eds. Re-Reading Levinas. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.

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Booth, Wayne C. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Chow, Rey. Ethics After Idealism: Theory, Culture, Ethnicity, Reading. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998. Colebrook, Claire. Ethics and Representation: From Kant to Post-Structuralism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999. Connor, Steven. Theory and Cultural Value. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Cornell, Drucilla. The Philosophy of the Limit. London: Routledge, 1992. Critchley, Simon. The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Cunningham, Anthony. The Heart of What Matters: The Role for Literature in Moral Philosophy. Berkeley: U of California P, 2001. Davis, Todd F., and Kenneth Womack, eds. Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture and Literary Theory. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2001. Eaglestone, Robert, ed. Ethics and Literature. Special issue of EJES 7.2 (August 2003). Eaglestone, Robert. Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1997. Fleischacker, Samuel. The Ethics of Culture. New York: Cornell UP, 1994. Garber, Marjorie, Beatrice Haussen, and Rebecca Walkowitz, eds. The Turn to Ethics. London: Routledge, 2000. George, Stephen K. Ethics, Literature, Theory: An Introductory Reader. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. Gibson, Andrew. Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel. From Leavis to Levinas. London: Routledge, 1999. Goldberg, S.L. Agents and Lives: Moral Thinking in Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. Hadfield, Andrew et al. The Ethics in Literature. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998. Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society. Durham: Duke UP, 1999. Hoffmann, Gerhard, and Alfred Hornung, eds. Ethics and Aesthetics: The Moral Turn of Postmodernism. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1996. Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. London: Athlone 1993. Jonsson, Ann Katrin. Relations. Ethics and the Modernist Subject in James Joyce’s “Ulysses”, Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves” and Djuna Barnes’s “Nightwood”. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. Kearney, Richard. Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage, Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Herbert Marcuse, Stanislaus Breton, Jacques Derrida. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984.

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Keulartz, Jozef. Pragmatist Ethics for a Technological Culture. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002. Kotte, Christina. Ethical Dimensions in British Historiographic Metafiction: Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, Penelope Lively. Trier: WVT, 2001. Krause, Dagmar. Timothy Findley’s Novels Between Ethics and Postmodernism. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005. Levinas, Emmanuel. Ethics and Infinity. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1985. —: Time and the Other. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1987. Levinson, Jerrold, ed. Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. London: Duckworth, 1981. McGinn, Colin. Ethics, Evil, and Fiction. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Miller, J. Hillis. The Ethics of Reading. New York: Columbia UP, 1987. Newton, Adam Zachary. Narrative Ethics. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. Norris, Christopher. Truth and the Ethics of Criticism. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1994. Nussbaum, Martha. Love’s Knowledge. Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1990. —: Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. —: The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. Palmer, Frank. Literary and Moral Understanding: A Philosophical Essay on Ethics, Aesthetics, Education and Culture. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Parker, David. Ethics, Theory and the Novel. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994. Rainsford, Dominic, and Tim Woods. Critical Ethics: Text, Theory and Responsibility. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999. Ricoeur, Paul: Soi-même comme un autre. Paris: Seuil, 1990. Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. Robbins, Jill. Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Schwerdtfeger, Barbara. Ethics in Postmodern Fiction: Donald Barthelme and William Gass. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 2005. Simms, Karl, ed. Ethics and the Subject. Critical Studies 8. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997.

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Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self. The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Tester, Keith. Media, Culture, and Morality. London: Routledge, 1994. —: Moral Culture. London: Sage, 1997. Toker, Leona: Commitment in Reflection: Essays in Literature and Moral Philosophy. New York: Garland, 1994. Williams, Bernard: Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985. Wulf, Christoph, Dietmar Kamper, and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, eds. Ethik der Ästhetik. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1994. Zimmermann, Jutta, and Britta Salheiser, eds. Ethik und Moral als Problem der Literatur und Literaturwissenschaft. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2006.

I. Theory Supported by History

ANGELA LOCATELLI (BERGAMO)

Literature’s Versions of Its Own Transmission of Values 1.1 Foundations and Questioning: The Diversity of Literature My original title was: “Figures and Interests, in an Extra-Mathematical Sense: The Experience of Literature as Transmission of Value.” The playful allusion to Nietzsche wished to imply that I would explore some of the ways in which “figures and interests” are intrinsically and invariably connected in literature, and in whatever “values” it aims to transmit. I still wish to do so, despite the change of title. Robert Eaglestone (“Navigating an Ancient Problem”) has recently argued that dealing with “Ethics and Literature” amounts to “Navigating an Ancient Problem,” and I can only add that the relationship of literature to value has always been as mobile as the definitions of “value” and of “literature” themselves. Throughout history, literature has provided an immediate and functional support to specific political situations and ideologies, as was the case, for example, with the Tudor “myth” in sixteenth century England, or with various na1 tionalisms in nineteenth-century Europe. The “canon debate” has recently demonstrated that literature still remains a foundation of power structures, in support of ethnic, sexual and other minorities, and in the definition of political identity. However, literature has also always been, and remains a locus of radical questioning and thus of suspension, and even dis-rupture, of the law. Foucault (La volonté de savoir), Deleuze (L’Anti-Oedipe, Dialogues, Critique et clinique) and Derrida (La dissémination, Positions, Parages, Spectres de Marx) are very eloquent on this, and have shown that literature challenges the discursive and juridical power of the prison system, of Oedipus, of dialectics, and of the Lacanian Symbolic. Literature is a heterogeneous universe, it is made up of a plurality of widely different texts, and we cannot ignore this diversity when assessing its function in the transmission of values. Literature includes fictions that are explanatory or supportive of a certain state of affairs, but we also have texts that oppose the status quo, and relentlessly challenge it. Together with

_____________ 1

Grabes “The Canon Pro and Contra,” Locatelli “Literariness, Consensus, or ‘Something Else.’”

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texts that are merely entertaining, we read texts that are both amusing and questioning, educational and transgressive. Some texts clearly fit a political agenda (emancipation narratives, trauma memoirs), but literature mostly consists of narratives that are very complex or even undecidable, works from which to extract a univocal “moral of the fable,” a singleminded intention, would be an unacceptable hermeneutic constraint. These texts tend to seem morally indifferent, or even immoral, not being directly committed to a specific ethical or political project. Their linguistic complexity signals an irreducible conceptual logic of plurality, and often provides the social experience of diverging views. The encounter with complex literary texts is also conducive to an experience of language which is not provided by other forms of knowledge. I believe, and will argue here, that the experiences of a discursive plurality, and of a special awareness of language, represent a cultural value in themselves, which does not exclude the fact that literary texts can also be made, and have always been made, functional to specific (and often even opposite) ethical 3 and political projects. In fact, the main point I wish to make is that what 4 I have elsewhere called “dialogic reading,” i.e., the critical and plurivocal hermeneutic activity which literature interminably provokes within individuals and among “interpretive communities,” makes it a value in itself, whether we think of literature as a means for the immediate, and “mimetic” transmission of specific value(s), or not. Criticality and dialogue in reading can turn the experience of literature into an ethical experience. The exercise of understanding, through both the acquisition of information (i.e., literary and historical knowledge) and through the imaginative identification with, or distancing from, the author’s language and from the characters’ actions, ideas and values, is at the core of the experienced value of literature. Starting from these premises, I will deal with the issue of literary mediation in the transmission of cultural value(s) at two levels: first through a historical contextualization (focusing on the changing rhetoric of literature’s moral purpose), and then, I will examine some aspects of the contemporary critical debate.

_____________ 2 3 4

I will argue that texts that are just a pastime are, in a sense, less “literary,” because less linguistically and cognitively complex. In fact, they promote an immediate enjoyment, and fast consumption, rather than a variety of critical interpretations. Shakespeare is paradigmatic in this respect. See Pujante and Hoenselaars. I have devoted several essays to the concept of “dialogic reading,” among the most recent I recall Locatelli, “Literature: Teaching Meets ‘Theory,’” “Literature’s Elusive Posture: Imposture?”, and Locatelli and Kahn “Preface” to the Issue Teaching Literature.

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1.2 The Changing Rhetoric of Moral Purpose: Intention or Tension? The letter of “Introduction” to this Symposium suggests, among several other stimulating considerations, that: “model behaviour is much more effective than preaching and teaching.” We are thus invited to perceive the relationship of literature and ethics in terms of a discursive difference, and a difference in the modus operandi of doctrine versus example. This is a perspective which foregrounds intentionality, and which has a long story behind it. Let me try to identify some salient episodes. In his famous A Defence of Poetry, Shelley stresses the fact that poetry is far more sophisticated than face-value pronouncements, and that directly “mimetic” statements and immediate “content” (i.e. characters and their actions) are not the only, and not even the primary levels on which art, and hence the ethical dimension of art, operates and should be judged. Shelley even proclaims that, since art is not doctrine, preaching would be a sign of its failure. While praising Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton, he suggests that: Those in whom the poetical faculty, though great, is less intense, as Euripides, Lucan, Tasso, Spenser have frequently affected a moral aim, and the effect of their poetry is diminished in exact proportion to the degree in which they compel us to advert to this purpose. (217)

In other words, an explicit “moral of the fable,”, and a manifest intention, diminish the imaginative potential of the art work, and thus fail to produce morally effective literature. Shelley’s argument reminds us that appropriate indoctrination and/or pious intentions are not the most desirable criteria for the definition of “good literature.” Readers are usually aware of the fact that novels à thèse are too predictable, and thus mostly boring. They may eventually come to be read as interesting historical material, but explicit and prescriptive works are usually soon dismissed, after the cause celèbre for which they were written has met with a political response and a solution, or after it has ceased to be a collective concern. Prescriptive and explicit works of literature are ultimately uninteresting, because readers are never sufficiently challenged, and even less transformed by the reading. The “poetic justice” enacted by narratives of bons sentiments is often insufficiently critical and is usually ephemeral, if not sustained by the aesthetic and cognitive complexities that make literature an enjoyable and dynamic interpretative universe. I am fully aware, of course, that in saying this I am positing aesthetic and cognitive complexity as a “value” in/of literature. I believe that literature reflects, but that it also moves far beyond a merely utilitarian and voluntaristic view of both language and of itself. This is where tension “wins” over intention. I believe that linguistic tensions and aesthetic sophistication promote the vi-

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tality of texts, and ultimately enhance the ethical relevance of literature, because by taking language to its limits, literature takes us to the level of the ultimate questions of being human in the world. 2.1 Rule and Example: Orthodoxy as Virtue Let me return to Shelley. His A Defence of Poetry clearly represents, on the whole, a confident appeal to the imagination as a moral agent, and while we still more or less subscribe to it, it may be worth recalling that it is precisely the aesthetics of Romanticism that has put forward and promoted such a position, and that, on the contrary, the imagination has for centuries remained the object of prevalent suspicion among scholars, schoolmasters, preachers, and even poets in their preoccupations about literature and value. Fantasy, and therefore fiction and poetry, had to be “justified” for centuries, and throughout the Renaissance fantasy, ornament and figural5 ity were not accepted for their own sake, or any supposedly intrinsic morality of their own, but almost exclusively in the classical rhetorical terms of docere delectando, i.e. as vehicles of instruction, as means to delight, and thus able to teach more effectively than through dry precepts. Indicative of this context is the difference between “phantasticos” and “euphantasioti” in George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie, and Sidney’s parallel distinction, in his Apologie, between “eikastike” and “phantasticke”. Nothing seems more distant than their views from Shelley’s. Puttenham outlines two moral, and at the same time epistemic positions of the poet. He describes them respectively as: the euill and vicious disposition of the braine [which] hinders the sounde iudgement and discourse of man with busie & disordered phantasies, for which cause the Greeks call him ‘phantasticos’.… Such persons as be illuminated with the brightest irradiations of knowledge and of the veritie and due proportion of things, they are called by the learned men not ‘phantastici’ but ‘euphantasioti’, and of this sort of phantasie are all good Poets. (Puttenham 156-157)

Sidney writes: For I will not denie, but that man’s wit may make Poesie, (which should be Eikastike, which some learned have defined figuring foorth of good things,) to be Phantastike: which doth contrariwise, infect the fancie with unworthy objects. (42)

Both Sir Philip Sidney’s and Francis Bacon’s praise of “parables” over other literary genres is significantly grounded in their evaluation of them _____________ 5

See Locatelli, “Literariness, Consensus, or ‘Something Else.’”

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as intentionally ethical narratives, but since even the most terse pedagogical fable needs the figurality of allegory to drive its message home, figurality is accepted because it is enlisted in a pedagogical and political project, and above all because it is part of the shared beliefs of an elitist intellectual community. Throughout the Renaissance most schoolmasters, preachers and poets usually remained suspicious of both the skepticism and the dissent of the minority of their contemporaries, and therefore literature’s primary aspiration was to become the means and end of a conceptual and moral orthodoxy. In Tudor and Stuart England poetry is significantly seen as a divine gift for the benefit of civilization, in a line of thought that stretches from the early humanists (Linacre, Colet, Ascham), to Thomas Wilson’s Rhetoric (1560), and to Ben Jonson Discoveries upon Men and Matter, posthumously published in 1641. Ben Jonson writes: The study of it [Poesy] (if wee will trust Aristotle) offers to mankinde a certain rule and Patterne of living well and happily, disposing us to all Civill offices to Society. If we will believe Tully, it nourisheth and instructeth our youth, delights our Age, adornes our prosperity, comforts our Adversity, entertaines us at home, keepes us company abroad, travailes with us, watches, devides the times of our earnest and sports, shares in our Country recesses and recreations; insomuch as the wisest and best learned have thought her the absolute Mistresse of manners and neerest of kin to Vertue. (113)

This is an emblematic expression of the ethical and social functions of literature in the Renaissance, when literature was expected to transmit social values in the form of the dominant beliefs of the intellectual, religious and political koiné (in a quasi pre-Arnoldian vein). But, of course, even then, some censors were attacking poetry and doubting the poet’s intentions. A telling example is Stephen Gosson’s School of Abuse, from which I will briefly quote: I despise this methode in writing which, following the course of amarous poets, dwelleth longest on those points that profit least, and like a wanton whelpe leaveth the game to run riot. The scarabe flies over many a sweet flower, and lighes in a cowsherd….Manie good sentences are spoken by Davus to shadowe his knavery, and written by poets as ornament to beautify their worke, and sette their trumperie to sale without suspect. (87)

The idea that art is just a cover for licentiousness, and that it provides an excuse to speak and show in public what is tabooed, and thus that art, far from transmitting value, surreptitiously condones what is morally sanctioned, is found at different times throughout history in the debate on art and ethics. Incidentally, I recall that it was also one of the traditional attacks against psychoanalysis (perceived in bourgeois and bigot circles as an excuse to talk about sex and to undermine the marital institution). Sidney’s well known reply to Gosson, his Apologie for Poetrie is a valuable philosophical contribution and an important cultural document. His

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irony in defending Comedies and Tragedies against bigotry is also truly enjoyable today, and, I venture to suggest, applicable to current censorship situations (I am thinking, for example of the current censorship debate on children’s literature in American schools and colleges): And little reason hath any man to say, that men learne evill by seeing it so set out […] although perchance the sack of his own faults, lye so behinde his back, that he seeth not himselfe daunce the same measure: whereto, yet nothing can more open his eyes, than to finde his own actions comntemptibly set forth. So that the right use of Comedy will (I thinke) by no body be blamed, and much lesse of the high and excellent Tragedy, that openeth the greatest wounds, and showeth forth the Ulcers, that are covered with Tissue: that maketh Kinges fear to be Tyrants, and Tyrants manifest their tyrannical humors: that with sturring the affects of admiration and commiseration, teacheth, the uncertainety of this world, and upon how weake foundations guilden roofes are builded. (Sidney 33-34)

In Sidney’s optimistic view literature “opens one’s eyes” and even curbs tyranny, by “contemptibly” representing vices and weaknesses. It is, once again, the successful enforcement of a cultural orthodoxy, even through negative examples. 2.2 Imagination and Ludic Energy The shift from classical rhetoric and poetics to modern aesthetics in the Eighteenth Century, and above all the epistemic revolution of Romanticism, re-conceptualized the relationship between ethics and literature in radically new terms. Imagination came to be valued as intrinsically ethical, thus bypassing and displacing the conscious poetic intention and efforts of “teaching and delighting.” As we have seen in the previous quotation from Shelley, abiding by explicit moral standards seems to deflect literature from its moral purpose, or what Romantic poets think this purpose to be, i.e., the imagination. Shelley writes: Ethical science arranges the elements which poetry has created and propounds schemes and proposes examples of civil and domestic life: nor is it for want of admirable doctrines that men hate, and despise, and censure, and deceive, and subjugate one another. But poetry acts in another and diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects as if they were not familiar. (216)

Under the term “ethical science,” schemes and examples are here associated, rather than set in opposition to each other. Poetry is, however, another matter: it is an Ars Magnanima in a strictly etymological sense: i.e., “it enlarges the mind”. For the Romantics the ethical value of poetry chiefly

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resides in this effect. No supplementary, intentional “use” of poetry is needed. In Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry another concept, which had evolved from Hume and the Scottish Philosophers of the Eighteenth Century, finds full expression, and serves to affirm the morality of the imagination, i.e. the concept of “empathy.” Shelley seems to anticipate Martha Nussbaum’s views (Nussbaum, Poetic Justice) on this point, when she writes: The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action or person, not our own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. (216)

From the Romantic poets we also derive the idea that the cognitive value of literature is the ground of its morality. Coleridge in the Biographia Literaria and Shelley in the above quotations clearly suggest that literature is the 6 realm of new conceptual possibilities. This aspect has very important consequences on our theme, because literature as imaginative revelation entails that it is a domain for the experience of alterity and diversity, and can become a source of alternative world pictures, and thus promote alternative rules and behaviors. Another element that comes to us as part of the Romantic legacy is the identification of art and style with spontaneity and energy. In a certain sense, we can see Nietzsche’s aesthetics as the farthest-reaching elaboration of such perspective. The Birth Of Tragedy From The Spirit Of Music, while actually suggesting that “art owes its continuous evolution to the Apollonian-Dionysiac duality,” gave unprecedented impulse to the valorization of “rapture” and “ecstatic reality.” Moreover, Nietzsche’s considerations 7 on truth and rhetoric contributed to the philosophy and practice of the Western artistic avant gardes throughout the Twentieth Century, and into the twenty-first. In On Truth and Lying in an extra-moral sense (1873) Nietzsche paints an unflattering portrait of humanity’s relationship to ethics and truth. Man’s mauvaise conscience is originally found in his preference for truth in a “restricted sense”: [Man] longs for the pleasant, life-preserving consequences of truth; he is indifferent to pure, inconsequential knowledge; toward truths which are perhaps even damaging and destructive, he is hostile. (Nietzsche, “On Truth” 248)

This reminds me, a contrario, of the moral stature of Oedipus who pursues truth at the cost of his own (well-)being. And takes me back to the tragic, but relentlessly ethical, and sobering note in Nietzsche’s philosophy: hu_____________ 6 7

This view is not distant from the Russian Formalists’ insistence on the defamiliarizing effect of literature. I am thinking in particular of “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-moral Sense.”

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mans, differently from the Greek hero, (want to) deceive themselves, and even more so when they hide the arbitrariness of what they have conventionally called “truth.” Since “men” want to “live socially in the herd,” truth is collectively and bindingly posited as such: What “truth” will be from now on is fixed; a uniformly valid and binding terminology for things is invented and the legislation of language also enacts the first laws of truth. For now, for the first time, the distinction between truth and lying arises. (Ibid.)

The “legislation of language” is a mystification of the radical split between language and truth: We arrange things by genders, we designate the tree (der Baum) as masculine, the plant (die Pflanze) as feminine: what arbitrary transferences![…] [T]he various languages, juxtaposed show that words are never concerned with truth. (Ibid.)

“Arbitrary delimitations,” “one-sided preferences,” “arbitrary substitutions,” “reversals of names” in language are exposed as versions of a selfinterested truth. However, we can find a pars construens in this apparently destruens philosophy: it is precisely the acute sense of “arbitrary transferences” intrinsically at work in language that provides a theoretical justification for the ludic energy of art. On this ground, the awareness of makebelieve and the gesture of self-expression inevitably merge, while spontaneity, lightness, exuberance, excess, and transgression can be posited as values, both ethical and aesthetic. This also subverts the view that art (fiction) is a lie, while philosophy is “truth,” and invites a “poetic” and selfconsciously rhetorical re-articulation of philosophy itself. 3. The Contemporary Debate: Criticality and Community The praise of the ludic and auto-telic element of art has gradually become mainstream in large sectors of contemporary aesthetics, following widely different interpretations of the German philosopher. Moreover, Nietzsche’s “grand style” has paradoxically inaugurated the entropy of the style we call “post-modern.” Paradoxically so: because it has also led to the cancellation of style in terms of aesthetic hierarchies (which for some theorists was the equivalent of the cancellation of style tout court). Some deconstructionists have also made too much out of De Man’s comment on Of the Use and Misuse of History for Life (De Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity”). Their position has, either willingly or unwillingly, favored a “commodification” of literature, essentially by promoting the rise of a techno-pragmatic (and a-ethical) logic of consumption. Market ideology profits from the collapse of the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow literature, and eagerly exploits it into the promotion of

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“fast” rather than “great” literature. A new literary canon has emerged, which is not the academic canon of “the classics,” or “the books one should read,” but “the books one must read NOW” (but will not need to bother to read in a year’s time). This is a particular brand, i.e., a non-academic version of the canon. The global market needs us to believe that “the latest” is the most valuable, in fashion, gadgets, films, and, of course, books. The ephemeral is a cultural dominant of postmodernity, and a synonym of value in the logic of global capitalism (Jameson “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic,” “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”). By suggesting that there are “founding” texts in each and every community, literature articulates various forms of resistance to the ephemeral, and this is of course why it seems dysfunctional to public interest, or why it is taken as ancillary in public discourse. On the other hand, in the perspective of consumption, literature may appear as one of the many available commodities, but is it just a mere commodity? Something to be taken like the latest brand of orange juice? Or does literature “work” (ethically) and “make sense” otherwise? Different answers are possible. One of them, which will be explored in the remaining pages, is that the exercise of interpretation which literature intrinsically involves is a good antidote against both fundamentalism and pragmatism, and not only technological and economic pragmatism, but also against the monolithic perspective of any dominant and/or rule-based interpretive community. The study of literature lets us know that there are cultures and worlds beyond the ones we inhabit, beyond the fantasies we are immersed in, and beyond the often unacknowledged logic of one’s own behavior (which tends to seem “natural” only because its ideology often remains invisible to the agent). This anti-narcissistic vein is actually also the beginning of a route between individuals and communities (the plural seems indispensable), indeed one of the major ethical points of literature, even if it does not automatically produce a peaceful solution to conflicts of interests. In 2004 at a roundtable on “The Future of the Humanities,” Toni Morrison unequivocally suggested that art can be put to ill uses, such as: notorious manipulations to still inquiry, incite violence, reaffirm rule. It can also be used to beat citizens into conformity by inventing a politely cruel vocabulary in which “different” means unacceptable. (Morrison et al. 717)

In the same occasion, Robert Scholes responded to George Steiner’s grim conclusions on literature’s incapacity to promote virtue (see Steiner) by recalling a long line of intellectuals, from Castiglione to Steiner himself, who, Scholes suggests, “have wanted to believe that taste entailed virtue.” (728). Scholes denounces the dubious historical alliance of taste with trade, and contrasts the views of the defenders of literature as virtue with those professed by Cardinal John Henry Newman in whose opinion “lib-

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eral knowledge” and the study of literature “can improve the minds—but 8 not the morals—of those who make the effort of acquiring them.” Newman believed that Christian doctrine and dogma, rather than literature, would teach moral virtue. Scholes’s argument on the function of literature in university curricula today leads away from both dogma (of whatever sort) and technological pragmatism, and comes to this topical conclusion: We must prepare our students to live and work in this world. And we must justify our existence in the terms offered by this world.9 But we cannot, and should not, simply accept those terms, for this is not so much a post-humanist world as an anti-humanist world, and what we have to offer it must be a reasoned critique of its values and practices. (729)10

I believe that the best way of dealing with this task is the creation of a collective debate around a plurality of (self-interested) interpretations. This debate inevitably leads to an increased awareness of one’s own position and interests, and to shared views (which does not mean shared interests, of course), in every interpretation that is produced. Given its special relationship to language and history, I believe that literature can, and should, provide the social energy of a relentless questioning on a priori meanings, values, concepts, identities, but also the energy for their dynamic negotiations and re-negotiations in the contexts of changing public interests. In the opening pages of Poetic Justice Martha Nussbaum focuses on the difference (but by no means opposition) between “empathetic imagining” and “rule-governed reasoning,” and writes: The literary imagination is part of public rationality, and not the whole. I believe that it would be extremely dangerous to suggest substituting empathetic imagining for rule-governed moral reasoning. (xvi)

Nussbaum deals with another, related aspect of literary ethical mediation, i.e. the abstract and general normativity of ethical reasoning, which she contrasts with the particular and “concrete” ethical approach of the novel, an instance of teaching through exempla, and in her view a strong means of inducing empathetic imagining: This play back and forth between the general and the concrete is, I claim, built into the very structure of the genre, in its mode of address to its readers. In this way, the novel constructs a paradigm of a style of ethical reasoning that is con-

_____________ 8 9 10

Newman 1955 cit. in Scholes 728. I suppose that here Scholes under the term “our existence” means “our profession,” but the lexical ambiguity is indeed a bit disquieting. Scholes goes on to say: “[…] we can help those who study with us learn to read and interpret our foundational texts in ways that are careful, sensitive and rational. This means we must read and discuss the important religious and political texts in our classes.[…] We need to contest the dogmas of fundamentalism and pragmatic techno bureaucracy in the academy and in public discourse about rights and values” (731 f.).

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text-specific without being relativistic, in which we get potentially universalizable concrete prescriptions by bringing a general idea of human flourishing to bear on a concrete situation, which we are invited to enter through the imagination. This is a valuable form of public reasoning, both within a single culture and across cultures. (Ibid. 8)

There are, however, as I have said in relation to Shelley’s idea of an “automatic” identification of the imagination with the good, several problematic elements in the concept of literary empathy. One of them is the possibility of the reader’s identification with the villain, rather than the hero, of the story (and someone could also object that the distinction between hero and villain is itself an a-priori and biased cultural categorization). Moreover, Martha Nussbaum herself, like Toni Morrison in the above quotation, is clearly conscious of the fact that fiction can convey intolerance and prejudice, as well as respect and empathy: Our society is full of refusals to imagine one another with empathy and compassion, refusals from which none of us is free. Many of the stories we tell one another encourage the refusal of compassion, so not even the literary imagination itself is free from blame […] practical politics […] frequently does seem impervious both to argument and to compassion, refusing the claim of another person’s story. (Ibid. xvii) 11

Ronald Shusterman has discussed Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge and has challenged the idea that “literature achieves its moral efficacy by teaching us lessons via the virtual or vicarious experiences it provides” (Shusterman 216). Shusterman asks the following question: if all fictional representations are susceptible of becoming a source of vicarious experience, how exactly does the literary experience become moral experience? His conclusion is that literature goes beyond the immediate phenomenological experiencing, and the ethical value of art is to be found in its capacity to “produce a shared discourse directed towards a communal event.” This meta-ethical effect corroborates my idea of “dialogic reading,” and suggests that in being susceptible to interpretation, and to a sophisticated plurality of readings, literature is not like a videogame, even when entertaining, and is not like a pill, even if it has a way of being therapeutic. The fact that there are memories of historical interpretations and interpretative traditions on the so called “foundational texts” in any culture shows how the experience of “dialogical readings” is one of the cultural values transmitted by literature. Literary interpretation, unlike a play-station, is both a means of transmitting value(s) and a value in itself. It improves the mood, but also the mind, and the social abilities, if not necessarily the virtue (but often the virtue as well, pace Newman), of various and different readers. A _____________ 11

Shusterman specifically mentions Martha Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature and Wayne C. Booth’s The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction.

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videogame can certainly be enjoyable, and improve one’s immediate reactive skills to itself; but it remains what Shusterman would call a perceptual and solipsistic enjoyment. Readers of literature, on the contrary, analyze and question the motives and logic behind certain fictional behaviors, and eventually come to a better understanding of “the world out there,” even if that world is miles away from a specific fictional setting, and the people one meets in the street are not Cleopatra or Dorothea Brooke. Literature is not a mere illustration of psychological motives and, above all, literature does not represent behaviors so that they may be imitated: a cookbook and a gardening instruction book do that; they have a practical value, but I am more than hesitant to call them “literature.” The experience of literature, on the contrary, increases our ability to deal with events, norms, and, before them, with what gives them meaning and value: i.e. language. In saying this I wish to imply that literature’s value is not utilitarian and pragmatic, but it lies in its criticality, i.e. in the fact that, while representing actions and characters, literature foregrounds the workings of language in the processes of subjectivization. In this specific sense literature connects to ethics. If we take a historicized approach to the definition of human subjectivity we will not be surprised to find that literature transmits values also by providing a convincing memory of time-specific subjectivities. In other words, literature may very well be the richest archive of extinct subjects, but indeed also the non-foundational ground of the manifold possibilities of endlessly articulating the subject. Ignorance can thrive in a society where a rule-based and univocal view of the world holds the stage. Not knowing other possibilities, scenarios, world pictures, and interpretative protocols undoubtedly leads to the blind arrogance of self-righteousness, and feeds into the absolutism of inevitably myopic, if not blind, norms. Pushed to its limit, this attitude obviously makes the encounter with otherness utterly impossible. Let us think, on the contrary, of how the study of literature activates the experience of otherness, starting from within language (for example, from figures such 12 as amphibology, metalepsis, paradox, metaphor and litotes). In fact, I believe that we should always read literary texts as something at once culturally representative and unique. They belong to both a subjective knowledge and to a shared knowledge. Language itself is shared and yet each writer of literature makes it new and makes it different, even unique, and poets show how language differs from itself (Deleuze, reading Kafka, docet 13 [1977, 1993]). _____________ 12 13

See Locatelli “‘For Nothing Was Simply one Thing.’” See also Lecercle.

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Without falling into the trap of a narrowly content-based and merely instrumental evaluation of literature (which is the prevalent trick of censorship, even in the name of political correctness) I also believe that art is a transformative event. In this sense I agree with Derek Attridge’s suggestion that reading can be “an attempt to respond to the otherness, inventiveness, and singularity of the work” (79); and that as far as literary reading is concerned, “mechanical and instrumental interpretation is complicated by what we may term readerly hospitality, a readiness to have one’s purposes reshaped by the work to which one is responding” (80). This takes the reader far beyond immediate and interested identification. I hope to have convincingly suggested that literature’s contribution in terms of value(s) is represented by its role in enlightening readers, through a specific hermeneutic activity, on the inescapable and subtly complex ways of language, on different subjective and collective positions, and in provoking both private thought and public debate, instead of erasing their very possibility. In other words, I believe that literature needs to be, and actually good literature always is, political and philosophical in a broad sense, rather than doctrinaire in a narrow sense. This is what makes it intrinsically ethical, i.e. perpetually imbricated with the question of being variously and perfectibly human. In Novalis’s poetic words, with which I want to conclude, I see literature as a “philosophizing that is truly total,” “a migration flight, which is communal, and towards a desired world.”

References Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature. London: Routledge, 2004. Booth, Wayne C. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Deleuze, Gilles. L’Anti-Œdipe. Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 1972. —: (with Claire Parnet). Dialogues. Paris: Flammarion, 1977. —: Critique et clinique. Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 1993. It. transl. Critica e clinica. Milano: Raffaello Cortina Editore, 1996. De Man, Paul. “Literary History and Literary Modernity.” Close Reading: The Reader. Eds. Frank Lentricchia and Andrew Dubois. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. 197-215. Derrida, Jacques. La dissémination. Paris: Seuil, 1972. —: Positions. Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 1972. —: Parages. Paris: Galilée, 1986. —: Spectres de Marx. Paris: Galilée, 1993.

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Eaglestone, Robert. “Navigating an Ancient Problem: Ethics and Literature.” EJES European Journal of English Studies, Ethics and Lit-

erature 7.2 (2003): 127-136.

Foucault, Michel. La volonté de savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. Gosson, Stephen. “The Schoole of Abuse (1579).” English Literary Criticism: The Renaissance. Ed. O.B. Hardison. New York: Appleton Century Crofts, 1963. 86-97. Grabes, Herbert. “The Canon Pro and Contra: ‘The Canon is Dead – Long Live Pick and Mix’.” Miscelànea: A Journal of English and

American Studies 30 (2004): 35-49.

Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” Postmodernism: A Reader. Ed. T. Docherty. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. —: “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” Modernism/Postmodernism. Ed. Peter Brooker. London: Longman, 1992. Jonson, Ben. “Discoveries upon Men and Matter (1641).” The Prelude to

Poetry. The English Poets in Defence and Praise of their own Art.

Ed. Ernest Rhys. London: Dent & Sons Ltd., 1970. 207-241. Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. Deleuze and Language. London: Palgrave, 2002. Locatelli, Angela. “Literature’s Elusive Posture: Imposture?” La conoscenza della letteratura/The Knowledge of Literature. Ed. Angela Locatelli. Vol 4. Bergamo: Bergamo UP, Sestante, 2005. 7-20. —: “Literariness, Consensus, or ‘Something Else.’” Tropismes n. 12. Whither Theory? Où va la théorie?. Paris: Université Paris X Nanterre, Centre de Recherches Anglo-Americaines, 2004. 173188. —: “‘For Nothing Was Simply one Thing’: Observations on the Knowledge of Literature.” La conoscenza della letteratura/The Knowledge of Literature. Ed. Angela Locatelli. Vol 3. Bergamo: Bergamo UP, Sestante, 2004. 141-152. —: “Literature: Teaching Meets ‘Theory’.” Textus 16.1 (2003): 17-26. —: “The ‘Doubleness’ of Figures in Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesie.” Quaderni del Dipartimento di Linguistica e Letterature Comparate dell’Università degli Studi di Bergamo 10 (1994): 223-233. Locatelli, Angela, and Coppélia Kahn. “Preface” to the Issue Teaching Literature. Eds. Angela Locatelli and Coppélia Kahn. Genova: Tilgher, Textus 16.1 (2003): 5-10. Morrison, Toni, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Ngahuia Te Awekotuku. “Guest Column: Roundtable on the Future of the Humanities in a Fragmented World.” PMLA 120.3 (2005): 715-723. Newman, John Henry. The Scope and Nature of University Education. London: Dent, 1955.

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Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-moral Sense.” 1873. Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language: with the Full Text of His Lectures on Rhetoric Published for the First Time. Eds. Sander L. Gilman, Carole Blair, and David J. Parent. New York: Oxford UP, 1989. 246-257. Nussbaum, Martha C. Poetic Justice. The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. —: Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990. Pujante, A. Luis, and Ton Hoenselaars, eds. Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2003. Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie. 1589. English Literary Criticism: The Renaissance. Ed. O.B. Hardison. New York: Appleton Century Crofts, 1963. 148-181, 156-157. Scholes, Robert. “Presidential Address 2004: The Humanities in a Posthumanist World.” PMLA 120.3 (2005): 724-733. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. A Defence of Poetry. 1840. The Prelude to Poetry. The English Poets in Defence and Praise of their own Art. Ed. Ernest Rhys. London: Dent & Sons Ltd., 1970. 207- 241. Shusterman, Ronald. “Content, Qualia, and Event: Some Theories of the Moral Role of Metaphor.” EJES European Journal of English Studies. Ethics and Literature 7.2 (2003): 215-227. Sidney, Sir Philip. An Apologie for Poetrie. 1595. The Prelude to Poetry. The English Poets in Defence and Praise of Their Own Art. Ed. Ernest Rhys. London: Dent & Sons Ltd., 1970. 9-60. Steiner, George. “The Muses Farewell.” Salmagundi 135.36 (2002): 148156.

HERBERT GRABES (GIESSEN)

Being Ethical: Open, Less Open, and Hidden Dissemination of Values in English Literature It is a truth universally acknowledged that hardly anyone wants to be preached to, although the urge to preach is fairly widespread. “But, please—not in literature,” will be the outcry of all who enjoy reading poems, stories or plays and who are highly allergic nowadays to the smell of what in German educational cant is called “Moralin,” a supposedly healthy, yet rather bitter and even acidically corrosive medicine. The only question is whether one can escape an encounter with moral values when reading English literature. Perhaps those are right who teach in schools and universities and keep averring that the reading of literary works is more than a mere pastime. The claim that literature also has an ethical function has, after all, been one of the most popular arguments in securing for it an important position in education and in the wider context of culture. Quite obviously, the need to try and justify postmodern works must have been intensely felt, because many authors had blatantly foregrounded their merely playful character and poststructuralist theory had been eager to demonstrate that there was no ontological foundation anyway on which to ground the free play of signifiers. Thus, from the later nineteen-eighties onwards, when the novelty effect of deconstruction and poststructuralism had worn off, such neo-humanist critics as Wayne C. Booth with The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (1988), David Parker with Ethics, Theory and the Novel (1992) and Leona Toker with the volume Commitment in Reflection: Essays in Literature and Moral Philosophy, edited in 1994, tried to stem the tide of the supposedly irresponsible display of arbitrariness. These critics must have received welcome encouragement from the fact that about the same time moral philosophy, robbed of its metaphysical foundation, discovered the field of aesthetics as a “post-metaphysical attraction,”1 and began to use literature, especially narrative, as a prime _____________ 1

Früchtl 3; my translation.

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source of examples and an educational medium for moral behavior. Despairing of being able to supply cogent arguments for the validity of an ethics of universal laws and rules as advocated by the philosophers of the Enlightenment, Alasdair MacIntyre in his widely acclaimed study After Virtue (1981) and Martha Nussbaum in Love’s Knowledge (1990) sought to revive pre-modern conceptions of ethics, most notably Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. This conception makes do with only one general principle, moderation, and hinges on the development of a particular kind of practical reason, phronesis. Being the ability to find an optimal solution for each particular case, phronesis is highly dependent on acute observation, aesthesis—indeed, so much so, that in practice the two become almost one. And as aisthesis is also the foundation of aesthetics, Aristotelean situational ethics and aesthetics rest on the same foundation, acute observation. Therefore it is not surprising that Nussbaum should take the novels of Henry James as her examples when trying to demonstrate that “this conception of moral attention and moral vision finds in novels its most appropriate articulation,” that “the novel is itself a moral achievement, and the well-lived life a work of literary art” (“Finely Aware and Richly Responsible” 516). Here is what she writes about The Golden Bowl: [...] [T]o confine ourselves to the universal is a recipe for obtuseness. (Even the good use of rules themselves cannot be seen in isolation from their relation to perceptions.) If this view of morality is taken seriously and if we wish to have texts that represent it at its best (in order to anticipate or supplement experience or to assess this norm against others), it seems difficult not to conclude that we will need to turn to texts no less elaborete, no less linguistically fine-tuned, concrete, and intensely focused, no less metaphorically resourceful, than this novel. (526)

The foremost reason why Nussbaum thinks moral philosophy must be complemented by literary works is that they are richer in detail and more complex in structure than the abstract discourse of philosophy. In her study The Fragility of Goodness (1986) she therefore starts out with a close analysis of the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles’s Antigone before comparing the views of Plato and Aristotle on her theme. Somewhat earlier even than Nussbaum, MacIntyre had tried to revive Aristotelian ethics, because he was of the opinion that the Enlightenment had failed and had led to the reign of mere arbitrariness. Attempting to reestablish a conception of the unity of life by subordinating all practical aims to an integrating internal teleology, he takes recourse to the synthesizing effect of narrative when he states that “the unity of an individual life” consists in the “unity of a narrative embodied in a single life” (218). MacIntyre’s ideas are, however, not as pertinent to our present theme, inasmuch as he has a rather broad notion of “narrative”:

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Narrative is not the work of poets, dramatists and novelists reflecting upon events which had no narrative order before one was imposed by the singer or the writer; narrative form is neither disguise nor decoration. Barbara Hardy has written that ‘we dream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct, gossip, learn, hate, and love by narrative’ in arguing the same point. (211)

On this basis he can then set up as a principle for individual ethics, “What is better or worse for X depends upon the character of that intelligible narrative which provides X’s life with its unity” (225). Narrative, particularly literary narrative, also plays an important role in Charles Taylor’s moral philosophy as presented in his study Sources of the Self (1989). Though taking into account the loss of an ontological foundation as held by postmodern epistemology, Taylor nevertheless believes that we can make choices between better or worse when conducting a dialogue between the background of values we have grown up with and what really matters to us. As we can make our own evaluations, we are responsible for what we are and can reach what he calls an ethics of authenticity. In such a context, literary narrative assumes greater importance, because it presents the choices of characters in particular situations as well as the causes for and consequences of these choices. In presenting particular characters in particular situations, it models ethical choices in a way which we can imagine to be similar to those we cannot avoid in our own socially embedded situation. This has to do with Taylor’s view that “we cannot but strive to give our lives meaning or substance, and [...] this means that we understand ourselves inescapably in narrative” (51). And in saying this he is well aware of the fact that there are many forms of narrativity: Our modern senses of the self not only are linked to and made possible by new understandings of good but also are accompanied by (i) new forms of narrativity and (ii) new understandings of social bonds and relations. (105)

Even without referring to Aristotle, Richard Rorty in his widely disseminated study Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989) largely draws on the interpretation of novels when he discusses moral issues, because they supply the degree of particularity that in his view helps to heighten our awareness of what is actually going on and thus can persuade us to be less cruel. Having first distinguished between “books which help us become autonomous from books which help us become less cruel,” he points out that the latter “can be divided into (i) books which help us see the effects of social practices and institutions on others and (ii) those which help us see the effects of our private idiosyncrasies on others” (Rorty 141). As he takes Marx’s Condition of the Working Class in England together with Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Les Misérables as examples of the former kind, categories

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like fictionality, aesthetic quality or literariness play no role in his argument. Yet as the “second sort of book [...] is about the ways in which particular sorts of people are cruel to other particular sorts of people,” he points out that “the most useful books of this sort are works of fiction which exhibit the blindness of a certain kind of person to the pain of another kind of person” (141). Subsequently interpreting some of Nabokov’s novels, on the grounds that “Nabokov’s capacity to pity others was as great as Proust’s capacity to pity himself” (155), Rorty endeavors to show that Humbert Humbert in Lolita and Kinbote in Pale Fire are the “particular sort of genius-monster—the monster of curiosity—” that “is Nabokov’s contribution to our knowledge of human possibilities” (161). Yet, Rorty observes, whereas Nabokov sensitized his readers to the permanent possibility of smallscale cruelties produced by the private pursuit of bliss, Orwell sensitized his to a set of excuses for cruelty which had been set into circulation by a particular group – the use of the rhetoric of “human equality” by intellectuals who had allied themselves with a spectacularly successful criminal gang. (171)

Wanting to be “of use to people who were suffering,” Orwell, in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, succeeded in breaking “the power of what Nabokov enjoyed calling “Bolshevik propaganda” over the minds of liberal intellectuals in England and America” (Rorty 170). For Rorty, the central statement in Nineteen Eighty-Four is that torture is not instrumental in any other way than to cause pain: “The object of torture is torture” (180), and the most menacing fact about the last part of that novel appears to be that “what our future rulers will be like will not be determined by any large necessary truths about human nature and its relation to truth and justice, but by a lot of small facts” (161). I have quoted so extensively from Rorty because I wanted to show how important the recourse to particular literary works can be for a moral philosopher, even when he argues more strictly than Taylor on the basis of a radically postmodernist epistemology. This needs stressing, because Nussbaum as well as MacIntyre draw conspicuously on pre-modern conceptions of ethics owing to their view that postmodern thought has led into the cul-de-sac of sheer arbitrariness. Apart from Rorty’s postmodern pragmatism, there have been other attempts to envision a postmodern ethics, although the postmodern position has generally been inimical to any establishing of moral values. It was, after all, the questioning of all kinds of values that was characteristic of a postmodern stance. One alternative was seen, however, in Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of alterity, which is based exclusively on the ethical imperative imposed on us by the face of the other person, a responsibility

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that fundamentally alters our notion of individual autonomy.2 This latter idea was taken up by Zygmunt Baumann in his influential study Postmodern Ethics (1993), where our moral capacities are considered as an anthropological given. Moral rules would only reduce our sense of personal responsibility, because “moral decisions, unlike abstract ethical principles, are ambivalent” (Baumann 32). In order to be able to act responsibly in regard to the other person, we have to be open-minded and ready to tolerate ambiguity. Not only philosophers, but also literary critics and theorists have sought to envision something like a “postmodern ethics.” It was above all the condemnation of the stance favored by deconstruction that led to the proposal of an “ethics of deconstructive reading” as made by Hillis Miller in his Ethics of Reading (1987). Operating on the basis of the metaphorical pan-textualism of Derridean deconstruction and a specious reading of a single sentence from Kant’s Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Miller proposes an analogy between the respect for a person and the respect for a text, and holds that it is finally language that engenders ethics: “The moral law is not just named in words but is brought into existence in words” (32). The Kantian categorical imperative as the foundation of Enlightenment ethics is accordingly interpreted as a linguistic category; hence all ethical discourse is as “unreadable” as all texts finally are held to be. An “ethical reading” will thus be one that will be constantly aware of the inevitable unreliability of all attribution of meaning to a text. As György Túry has already pointed out most of the weak points in Miller’s argument in the 2003 EJES issue on “Ethics and Literature,”3 I can restrict my comments to the reminder that such “ethical reading” was already an essential feature of traditional hermeneutics, though the insight that texts have no stable meanings there has been considered as an epistemological rather than an ethical stricture. Anyway, critical anthologies like The Moral Turn of Postmodernism (1996) or The Ethics in Literature (1999) as well as Andrew Gibson’s Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas (1999) document that in the later nineteen-nineties the so-called “ethical turn” had definitely taken place. By writing about “Ethics, Aesthetics, and Alterity,” I also at that time joined the discussion about the ethical aspect in and of literature in the postmodern era. Holding that “since the beginning of modernism the aesthetics of art has been determined by the task of enabling the experience of alterity” (Grabes, “Ethics, Aesthetics, and Alterity” 23), I pointed _____________ 2 3

See his Ethics and Infinity (1985). “An Ethics Founded on Textuality: J. Hillis Miller’s Ethical Criticism.”

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to the ethical significance of a more general and formal development of literature and art, [a] continuous process of displacement of emphasis from unity to multiplicity and alterity in the history of modern aesthetics. Whereas, in the aesthetics of harmony unity or concord had a clear priority, in modernist art the tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces became clearly visible through a strengthening of alterity, and the emphasis lay somewhere in the middle. In postmodern aesthetics, the centre of gravity has shifted so much towards multiplicity and alterity that unity is no longer “given” (or, as in the perspectivism of modernist art, at least suggested), but has to be established by the beholder, listener, or reader with all the arbitrariness and provisional validity of a momentary subjective synthesis. (25)

The latter pertains at least to the works of earlier or high postmodernism. In the meantime, we have moved, in my opinion, from the aesthetic of the strange to an aesthetic of subtle variation,4 and the consequences of the implied return of even pre-modernist structures of presentation for a possible ethical effect have yet to be gauged. There have also been various attempts to show that postmodern fiction, despite its discontinuity of narration and the disturbance of mimetic illusion by metafictional inserts, does have an ethical dimension, though it may be different from that of the well-made novel. In her study Ethical Dimensions in British Historiographic Metafiction (2001), Christina Kotte sets out to demonstrate that Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters (1990), Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) and Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger (1987) prove to be quite rewarding when approached from an ethical point of view. With regard to Barnes, she comes to the conclusion that his “insistence on love and on ‘objective’ truth as regulative ideas which enable us to take a stand and thus make moral decisions interrupts and disrupts the postmodern ‘logic’ of the ten stories” (Kotte 105) and holds that “Barnes’ History possesses a distinct moral dimension by insisting on the limits to the postmodern destabilization of representation” (106). Referring to Lyotard, she claims for Swift’s Waterland an “Ethics of Testifying to the Differend,” inasmuch as “Waterland [...] does not seek a truth at all but seeks to testify to an event to which no truth can be assigned, that cannot be made an object of conceptual representation” (Kotte 134). This is considered by Lyotard (and by Kotte) as an ethical stance, for “he holds that any history that remains within the realm of representation is necessarily complicit with the exclusionary politics that has suppressed minorities” (Kotte 136). Holding that Lively’s Moon Tiger _____________ 4

See Grabes, “From the Aesthetic of the Strange to the Aesthetic of Subtle Variation: Literature and Art Since the Advent of Modernism.”

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above all presents “Ethical Encounters with Alterity,” Kotte attempts to link this novel closely with Levinas’s ethics of alterity: Responsibility for the Other, Moon Tiger seems to suggest, can only result in the faltering or even complete failing of historical representation. If the Other cannot be ‘comprehended’ by the historian but is always radically in excess of what historical discourse would make of him or her, then historiography must indeed be violent per se. (170)

What we get here is the typical method of deconstruction, of reading one text “through” another text, preferably a literary text through a philosophical one or the other way around. What is ostensibly proved by so doing is that we arrive at a somewhat more determinate meaning for an otherwise very ambiguous text when we narrow the field of choice by placing one text upon another one and looking at the extent to which they overlap. Though the surprise at the “fit” between a postmodern novel and a postmodern version of philosophical ethics is not overly great, Kotte’s study is a good example of the opportunities such conjunctions offer to a discerning critic. The wide range of the “ethical turn” in both philosophy and literary criticism and theory is presented superlatively by both Barbara Schwerdtfeger in the first part of her recent book on Ethics in Postmodern Fiction: Donald Barthelme and William Gass (2005) and Dagmar Krause in the chapter on “Ethics” of her recent study Timothy Findley’s Novels between Ethics and Postmodernism (2005). Schwerdtfeger intends to show that the fiction of Barthelme and Gass—and this means very experimental works from the earlier phase of postmodernity—can be held to explore ethical issues, albeit in an unconventional way. Because both writers steer clear of providing any basis for concrete ethical norms, yet nevertheless offer the opportunity to acquire what could be called the preconditions for an ethical stance, their procedure belongs to the field of hidden influence, an indirect ethical impact of which we will hear more. What Krause concentrates on is the question “whether what can be gathered in terms of an ethical stance in the novels is also to be deemed postmodern or whether the overall labeling of FINDLEY as a postmodern author might have to be qualified in this respect” (46). A further quite recent attempt to delineate the ethical aspect of literature is that presented by Philipp Wolf in the March 2006 volume of Anglistik. Aware of the fact that “[l]iterature in itself does not necessarily suggest or cause a moral improvement of its readers,” Wolf chooses what he calls a “weak approach which takes into regard the open and dialogical character of literature” (Wolf 165). His three suggestions regarding “ethical purposes literature may perform” are: (i) “responsive dialogue. The reader responds to an unheard of and singular literary experience”; (ii)

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“the mnemonic and historical responsiveness of literature”, which permits us to “enter into a dialogue with the forgotten”; and (iii) “responsive selfcontemplation,” which is “mainly confined to the lyrical mode” (157). Though we are given persuasive examples for all three of these functions, it remains an open question whether they meet the quite strict criterion Wolf sets up in the first part of his essay when dealing with the proposals of other theorists, namely, “[a]n ethical discourse should be applied to literature only if literature can serve its ethical purposes and pragmatic expectations more successfully than other discourses” (155). Reception theory has so highlighted the reader’s share in the construction of textual meaning that one hardly dares speculate nowadays on the particular meaning a text communicates, let alone on its most likely effect. It thus follows that it might be quite risky to attribute to works of literature an actual ethical impact. Fortunately we are dealing primarily with the mere dissemination of values, so that it will be of less consequence to us whether or to what degree literature can contribute to making bad men (or women) good or at least, as Fielding hoped, “good men wise.” That values of various kinds are disseminated through literature and that literature does work on the ethical imagination is, however, something that is hardly in dispute. In theory, there is considerable potential for conflict between the ethical stance and the aesthetic stance, because both tolerate no encroachment on their sphere and allow no limits to be placed on their validity. From the ethical point of view, no provision is made for any human sphere that is exempt from moral responsibility, while aesthetics claims absolute autonomy.5 On the other hand, the ancient Greek concept of kalokagatia, the synthesis of the beautiful and the good, remained the norm for European literature until the nineteenth century. From a historical perspective, even my initial remark about the reluctance to be preached at needs qualification. How else can one account for the popularity of moral personification and allegory in medieval times or of satire well into the eighteenth century? The reaction to the extent to which literary works openly disseminate values, especially moral values, must have changed considerably since the eighteenth century, and it is only since then that so-called didactic literature has widely been considered to be second-rate. As even my perfunctory overview will soon show, it is indeed the case that works that have much to offer in terms of both prodesse and delectare have generally best stood the test of time. The parading of values, however, has been by no means as pernicious regarding literary reputation as one might be inclined to think. In order to get a better take on this matter, _____________ 5

See Grabes, “Ethics and Aesthetics.”

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I have looked at a considerable number of more successful works from the history of English literature in order to see whether the way in which values are presented is very open, fairly open, less open, or concealed, or whether it is hard to speak of a dissemination of values at all. Very open, of course, is the modus operandi in medieval personification allegory, in which many of the figures are walking and acting virtues or vices. How well this kind of writing can stand the test of time is proved by Langland’s late fourteenth-century Piers Plowman or by a morality play like Everyman (~1500). The values displayed in these works were, of course, such that the readers or the audience would be well acquainted with them, and, as the popularity of the figure of the “Vice” shows, the attraction must have lain in the way the authors made them come alive and perform. Over time, however, the literary success of pure allegory has been rather limited. It is telling that in works of superior quality such as Spenser’s Faerie Queene or Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress the level of the morality signified no longer reigns supreme. In the former case, the myriad of adventures on the literal level turns the epic into “darke conceit,” and in the latter it is the ample rendering of the protagonist’s psychological reactions that turns the book into a forerunner of the English novel. What has remained quite attractive until this day, though, is allegorical interpretation of the moral kind. With its attempt at showing that a text carries a consistent level of moral instruction it has since the late medieval allegorization of Ovid been a favorite field of activity for critics with a moral bent. We can, indeed, speak in such cases of “allegories of reading,” and I am aware of the danger of creating such when assuming that a work contains concealed values. Yet I do not follow Paul de Man in his radical view that every reading produces allegories: to point out an indirect communication of some moral value or other cannot be the same as establishing a whole plane of moral signification.6 Of course, the genre of allegory was not in any need of allegorical interpretation, because the moral values were quite openly displayed. The same can be said for late sixteenth-century satires like George Gascoigne’s The Steel Glas, Stephen Gosson’s Glasse to View the Pride of Vaingloriouse Gentlewomen, Joseph Hall’s Virgidemiarum or John Marston’s Scourge of Villanie, as well as for such seventeenth-century “characters” as Hall’s Characters of Virtues and Vices, the famous characters that Sir Thomas Overbury added to the 1614 edition of A Wife and which were added to continuously by several authors, John Earle’s Microcosmography, or Thomas Fuller’s The Holy State. _____________ 6

See his Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust.

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That the attractiveness of moral satire with its very open display of values was still undiminished in the eighteenth century is documented by the success of Samuel Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes, in which he unmasked the vaingloriousness of political power, military glory and civil high reputation in the manner of Juvenal, and by his novel Rasselas, which is likewise, and above all, an attack on the vanity of human wishes, framed by an exotic oriental tale. Though allegory and formal satire were particularly well suited for the overt display and dissemination of values, Thomas More had already shown in his Utopia of 1516 that these were not the only genres allowing for such a rhetorical strategy. Particularly Hythloday’s description of Utopian society in Book II is full of moral and political values which guide the life of the people, and the fact that the work was written in Latin ensured its dissemination throughout Europe. While tales of strange lands and societies were not unusual at the time of the great discoveries, and while the curiosity feeding demand for such tales may have been the primary incentive for the readers of More’s book, it seems highly improbable to us that a philosophical poem written two hundred years later, Pope’s Essay on Man (1734), should also have attained such international fame. Being consistently styled as a persuasio, a rhetorical speech in a lawsuit presenting the view of one of the contestant parties, and refuting all possible or actual objections, the poem attempts to prove that man, by stint of moral behavior, will be able to attain happiness on earth and become confirmed in his faith that he is a creation of a wise and benevolent god. The values printed in capitals appear almost as allegorical figures, and the author sees himself as a “Poet or Patriot, [who] rose but to restore/ The Faith and Moral, Nature gave before” (III, 285-6). In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, the values that were very direct and openly presented mostly changed from being moral to being social or political. An early instance is The Mask of Anarchy, which Shelley wrote in 1819 as a direct reaction to the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in the same year in which some of the 50,000 people who had assembled to demand social and political reforms were killed by militia and about 400 seriously wounded. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Bernard Shaw had found in the drama the most effective medium for the dissemination of his socialist ideas. In plays like Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Major Barbara and Saint Joan he tried openly to persuade the public to change its moral attitudes, and what might not have been clear enough in the dramatic text he underscored in long prefaces. Political values figure prominently in the left-wing poetry of the earlier nineteen-thirties—for instance, in the poems from W.H. Auden’s collection The Orators, in Stephen Spender’s Marxist program-poem “Not pal-

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aces, an era’s crown,” or in Cecil Day Lewis’s “Newsreel” from 1938. From the early nineteen-thirties we also find Aldous Huxley’s successful utopian attack on belief in the wholesome effect of scientific progress, Brave New World, but the widest dissemination of political values was reached by George Orwell after World War II with Animal Farm and the even more menacing destruction of human morals in Nineteen Eighty-Four. These better-known works from the history of English literature go to show that even a very strong foregrounding of moral, social or political values does not necessarily produce unreadable sermons. It can, however, even be demonstrated (at least for Britain) that most of the works to which we ascribe high aesthetic quality also present such values rather openly. It may seem awkward to trot out some of these works before informed readers, yet it must be done in order to indicate the extent to which the open dissemination of values determines a whole national literature. To begin at the very beginning, what else should motivate the protagonist of the eighteenth-century heroic epic Beowulf to perform dangerous tasks than being called to duty by some others’ plight? Though it is true that courage and valor are expected of a hero and extraordinary feats will be rewarded with honor and gifts, in Beowulf the obligation to help those in need supplies the desire for adventures and glory with a moral cause. The next great English epic appeared not before the end of the sixteenth century, and though I have already mentioned Spenser’s Faerie Queene in a different context, it should be remembered that each of the completed six books is expressly meant to depict a particular virtue, namely Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, and “Courtesie,” and in a letter to Raleigh the author declared that it was his intention “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline” (Spenser 1). There can hardly be any doubt that someone who so forcefully depicts dangerous enemies like Despair, Slander, Care, Envy, Detraction, Scandal, and the dragon of Sin wanted to invest the attractively presented adventures with a moral sense. To point out that even the Bard was, in quite a few of his plays, an openly moral writer may be seen by some as an attempt to downgrade his aesthetic achievement and not particularly welcomed. Yet the overall effect of plays like Richard III, The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, Othello, or Macbeth—to name some obvious cases—rests so much on the moral aspect foregrounded as a foil to the workings of human desires and fears that this aspect must be considered as both quite openly present and absolutely essential to the functioning of the plays. What kind of dramatic conflict would remain if it were held to be quite acceptable to all charac-

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ters in the plays and to the audience or readers to murder those who stand in the way of one’s ambition, or those who seem suitable objects of revenge; to rape, slander, kill at will? The sheer display of violence without a moral foil would not be half as powerful and moving as the sharp discrepancy between what should be and what is. When speaking of values, we should not allow religious norms and the religious foundation of morality to stray too far from our purview. All too well known is the acutely felt obligation to give a daily account of one’s life and of the accompanying search for signs of God’s grace in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. This is what turns an adventure tale for children into the quest of Calvinist believers for the assurance that they are among the elect and the saved and what lends the novel a moral and religious seriousness even without the Serious reflections during the life and surprising adventures of Robinson Crusoe, with his vision of the angelick world that were published shortly after the successful first and less successful second part of the novel and which are normally not reprinted. With Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded the moral aspect is already advertised in the title, and the sentiments of the heroine as expressed in the letters to her parents may appear naive, yet to most contemporary readers they seemed sincere. Fielding and some others suspected, however, that the resistance of the servant girl to the indecent advances of her mistress’s son and later master which led to her being married by him and becoming a lady may have been part of a shrewd scheme. Anyway, in Richardson’s second successful novel Clarissa the heroine’s virtue is not rewarded at all. Unable to cope with being raped by the ruthless young aristocrat she actually loves, she dies in shame. But there is, and most probably must be, at least some poetic justice achieved by the fact that her parents recognize how much they contributed to her sad fate by attempting to force her into an unwanted marriage and that her seducer is killed by one of her relatives in a duel. While Richardson was regarded as a paragon of virtue, Fielding, at least in some nineteenth-century literary histories, was frowned upon for having been rather frivolous if not downright immoral. The reason was not only that he burlesqued Richardson’s Pamela in his own novel Shamela because—as I said—he thought that Pamela’s virtue was a sham. It was at least as much the fact that he let the protagonist of The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling make good in spite of his rather loose morals. Yet what the novel actually tries to teach is that there are villains like Blifil or Lady Bellaston and hypocrites like Square or Thwackum on the one hand and on the other good-natured characters like Tom or Allworthy or Sophia Western who may be naive and at times misguided yet always possessed of benevolence. That is, we are dealing in no way with an amoral or immoral

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stance but with an ethics of basic and fated human disposition which is absolutely at odds with the bourgeois morality of cautious observance of social codes prevalent at the time. We are, of course, pretty close to the latter in Jane Austen’s novels, although she actually attempted to demonstrate that being good or bad had a lot to do with the right balance between the head and the heart, with an intelligent assessment of both the social environment and individual desire. This becomes evident in the fact that the two worst enemies of felicitous human relationships make up the title of one of her best novels, Pride and Prejudice, and she shows that both can be overcome and human happiness attained—at least within the limited frame of English country life of the lower gentry and upper middle class in her own time. In dealing with the rather open display of values in the English novel, I have to change my manner of presentation at this point at the latest in order to avoid becoming tedious. Social values are so prominent in the novels of Dickens, moral ones in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, or both kinds in Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles that it seems quite sufficient to mention these works to anyone who has ever read them. And Conrad’s Lord Jim, E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net, John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Antonia S. Byatt’s Possession are powerful testimonies to the survival of this moral substratum right up to the end of the twentieth century. While the novel with its usual focus on interpersonal relationships seems predestined for the inclusion of an ethical aspect, this may seem less so regarding poetry, especially after the turn to subjectivity in the Romantic period. Yet from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Wordsworth’s Prelude, and Byron’s Cain through Tennyson’s Maud, Swinburne’s Dolores, and Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book to modernist poems like Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley or T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and even up to Larkin’s Church Going or James Fenton’s Out of the East, moral seriousness is too evident to be missed. There remain those cases in which the dissemination of values occurs in a concealed manner—cases in which the reader has to infer the values from the more ambiguous situations that are presented and in which clear moral outlines seem only to appear after some critics have discovered (or established) them. Rather early examples would be Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy from the later eighteenth century, and Romantic works as altogether different as Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. There are, of course, many more examples to be found in the twentieth century; I would like to mention only such well-known works as Joyce’s Ulysses, Vir-

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ginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and Pinter’s The Caretaker or Homecoming. As soon as the dissemination of values occurs in a hidden way, there is ample room for discussing whether it occurs at all, and as critics have done their best to convince us that even British postmodern writing, for all its anti-foundationalist stance and foregrounded arbitrariness, implies an ethical aspect, I would like to mention some earlier works in which it will not be easy to detect genuine moral values. How about Coleridge’s Kubla Khan: or a Vision in a Dream, Keats’s Endymion, Byron’s Don Juan, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the LookingGlass? And how about Virginia Woolf’s The Waves or Joyce’s Finnegans Wake? Having kept in mind the decisive role of acute observation in Aristotelean ethics, one could hold that even in the reading of these works an ethical aspect is involved, and from the point of view of the Levinean ethics of the Other there is any amount of confrontation with otherness in such a reading. In a similar vein, one might claim an indirect ethical dimension for the literature of the last few decades that is largely determined by an aesthetic of subtle variation. As I have already dealt with this phenomenon elsewhere,7 I would like to mention here just a few works such as Robert Nye’s Faust (1980), Emma Tennant’s Tess (1993) or Marina Warner’s Indigo, or the Mapping of the Waters (1992). If there is any writing that will make us look intensely for subtle differences and thus enhance our capacity for acute observation, it is pastiche. And if moral philosophers from Aristotle to Taylor and Nussbaum are not entirely mistaken, acute observation of the particular situation to be judged or decided on is absolutely essential in practical ethics. Perhaps the fact that we are less inclined to treasure an open display of moral rules and models is not to be regretted if more recent works induce us to pay more attention to even more subtle differences. The reading of such works alone is insufficient to install in the human community something like a situational ethic, but it will hopefully contribute to make this more likely. Optimism is, after all, not yet forbidden.

_____________ 7

See Grabes, “Timely or Out of Joint? Transformations of the Aesthetic and Cultural Change.”

References Baumann, Zygmunt. Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. Booth, Wayne C. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. Früchtl, Josef. “Ethik und Ästhetik: Eine nachmetaphysische Attraktion.” Philosophische Rundschau 39 (1992): 3-28. Gibson, Andrew. Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas. New York: Routledge, 1999. Grabes, Herbert. “Ethics, Aesthetics, and Alterity.” Ethics and Aesthetics: The Moral Turn of Postmodernism. Eds. Gerhard Hoffmann and Alfred Hornung. Heidelberg: Winter, 1996. 13-28. —: “Ethics and Aesthetics.” ranam 36 (2003): 39-45. —: “From the Aesthetic of the Strange to the Aesthetic of Subtle Variation: Literature an Art since the Advent of Modernism.” Return to Postmodernism: Theory, Travel Writing, Biography. Festschrift in Honour of Ihab Hassan. Ed. Klaus Stierstorfer. Heidelberg: Winter, 2005. 7990. —: “Timely or Out of Joint? Transformations of the Aesthetic and Cultural Change.” Aesthetic Transgressions: Modernity, Liberalism, and the Function of Literature. Festschrift für Winfried Fluck zum 60. Geburtstag. Eds. Thomas Claviez, Ulla Haselstein, and Sieglinde Lemke. Heidelberg: Winter, 2006. 39-57. Hadfield, Andrew, et al., eds. The Ethics in Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1999. Hoffmann, Gerhard, and Alfred Hornung, ed. Ethics and Aesthetics: The Moral Turn of Postmodernism. Heidelberg: Winter, 1996. Kant, Immanuel. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and What Is Enlightenment. Trans. Lewis White Beck. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merril, 1959. Kotte, Christina. Ethical Dimensions in British Historiographic Metafiction: Julian Barnes,Graham Swift, Penelope Lively. Trier: WVT, 2001. Krause, Dagmar. Timothy Findley’s Novels between Ethics and Postmodernism. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005. Levinas, Emmanuel. Ethics and Infinity. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1985. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 2nd ed. London: Duckworth, 1985.

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Miller, J. Hillis. The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin. New York: Columbia UP, 1987. Nussbaum, Martha. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. —: “Finely Aware and Richly Responsible: Literature and the Moral Imagination.” Literature and the Question of Philosophy. Ed. Anthony J. Cascardi. London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987. 167-91. —: Love’s Knowledge. Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990. Parker, David. Ethics, Theory and the Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Pope, Alexander. “An Essay on Man.” The Poems of Alexander Pope. Ed. John Butt. London: Methuen, 1965. 501-47. Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Schwerdtfeger, Barbara. Ethics in Postmodern Fiction: Donald Barthelme and William Gass. Heidelberg: Winter, 2005. Spenser, Edmund. “A Letter of the Authors [...] To the Right Noble and Valorous Sir Walter Raleigh, Knight [...].” Edmund Spenser. The Faerie Queene. 2 vols. Everyman’s Library 443. London: Dent, 1910. Repr. 1964. Vol. I, 1-4. Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Toker, Leona, ed. Commitment in Reflection. Essays in Literature and Moral Philosophy. New York: Garland, 1994. Túry, György. “An Ethics Founded on Textuality: J. Hillis Miller’s Ethical Criticism.” European Journal of English Studies 7.2 (2003): 205-14. Wolf, Philip. “The Ethics of Literature: A Reconsideration with Three Suggestions.” Anglistik 17.1 (2006): 151-66.

MARSHALL BROWN (WASHINGTON)

Transcendental Ethics, Vertical Ethics, and Horizontal Ethics That second-floor arch in a London house, looking up and down the well of the staircase, and commanding the main thoroughfare by which the inhabitants are passing; by which cook lurks down before daylight to scour her pots and pans in the kitchen; by which young master stealthily ascends, having left his boots in the halls, and let himself in after dawn from a jolly night at the Club; down which miss comes rustling in fresh ribbons and spreading muslins, brilliant and beautiful, and prepared for conquest and the ball; or master Tommy slides, preferring the bannisters for a mode of conveyance, and disdaining danger and the stair; down which the mother is fondly carried smiling in her strong husband’s arms, as he steps steadily step by step, and followed by the monthly nurse, on the day when the medical man has pronounced that the charming patient may go down stairs; up which John lurks to bed, yawning with a sputtering tallow candle, and to gather up before sunrise the boots which are awaiting him in the passages:-that stair, up or down which babies are carried, old people are helped, guests are marshalled to the ball, the parson walks to the christening, the doctor to the sick room, and the undertaker’s men to the upper floor—what a memento of Life, Death, and Vanity it is—that arch and stair—if you choose to consider it, and sit on the landing, looking up and down the well! (William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair, ch. 61) Wenn man durchaus will, ist jeder deplaciert. (Theodor Fontane, Der Stechlin, ch. 19) The casuists have become a byword of reproach; but their perverted spirit of minute discrimination was the shadow of a truth to which minds and hearts are too often fatally sealed—the truth, that moral judgments must remain false and hollow, unless they are checked and enlightened by a perpetual reference to the special circumstances that mark the individual lot. (George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss 7.2)

Ethics is in the air. It is being talked about on all sides. It’s very satisfying to talk about ethics. Just raising the question of ethics seems to make you a more ethical person. Certainly, the contrary has a certain validity; if you

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never pay attention to ethics, you are liable to slide down the scale. Airtime for ethics is not a bad thing. Still, there is a risk of subreption. As Laurence Sterne’s Walter Shandy controverts the French for the illusion “That talking of love, is making it” (ch. 9.25), so it is important to recognize that merely talking of ethics is not enough. There is an ethical practice as well as an ethical stance. The purity of absolute responsibility, the postulate of a universal morality: these are indispensable regulative ideals derived from the starry heavens above, but actual encounters take place on the ground, not in the air. Face to face is where we face up to actuality. In invoking the ethical face I am alluding to the language of Emmanuel Lévinas, the guru of the moment in academic discussions of ethics.1 Ethics, for Lévinas, is the irreducible terrain where self meets Other. Recognition, stripped of its Hegelian dialectic and hence reduced to mere acknowledgment, is the medium of Lévinasian ethics. The ethical stance, for Lévinas, transcends individual situations: it is total, indeed, more-thantotal, infinite, and metaphysical.2 It lies, as another Lévinas title has it, beyond essence. Nothing compares with its sublime abstraction. It is the infinite conversation, the encounter without end, displacing the pragmatism of politics with a utopian pacifism. Lévinas claims to replace the Kantian moral imperative with a Cartesian ethical Desire (“Visage” 231). But the latter is no less abstract than the former. In his usage, “face” is an idea, not a phenomenon; it is the factor unifying all humans as ethical beings rather than any kind of individual or differentiating mark. It has no features: “In the face there is an essential poverty; the proof is that people try to hide this poverty by posing, by giving themselves a countenance” (Lévinas, Ethique 90).3 Being is humanized by language, but again only as the brute fact of speech, as a kind of “langue sans paroles”; in Lévinas’s formulation, “Language conditions thought: not language in its physical materiality, but as an attitude of the Same with regard to the other, irreducible to the representation of the other, irreducible to an intention of thought, irreducible to a consciousness of …” (“Visage” 224; Lévinas’s suspension points). Transcendental ethics are a posture without a praxis, independent of situation, of culture, of psychology, of codes, standards, or manners. A purist credo of this nature is not to be despised, certainly, for good behavior not anchored in a well of goodness risks dissolving into the calculations of Macchiavellian _____________ 1 2 3

Emmanuel Lévinas, “Visage et éthique.” Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité; “Le visage.” Ethique et infini: Dialogues avec Philippe Nemo. “It is this ethical relation that Levinas describes, principally in Totality and Infinity, as metaphysical” (Critchley 10). All unattributed translations are my own.

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virtú. Yet Lévinas offers little by way of a beachhead in daily life. Regulative ideals, whether in Kant or in Lévinas, tell us what we ought to do, not what we can do, and they draw their force from the impossibility of ever satisfying their demands. As Gerald L. Bruns paraphrases Lévinas, “the ethical relation – the encounter with another is a movement toward the stranger, that is, toward the nonidentical, rather than a movement of recognition in which I take the other into my world, gathering up the other as a component of my self-possession or as part of my domestication or familiarization of my world. Indeed, it is not too much to say that for Lévinas the dispossession of the self is the condition of the ethical as such” (35). Bruns finds this vision “too abstract” (48). I have to agree. I don’t think that ethics can live so airlessly. The aim of my essay is to draw from literary representations some visions to concretize the ethical encounter, to bring the discussion back from the beyond. Consequently, my real concern is not with Lévinasian transcendentalism, but with a certain more terrestrial absolute. Tipped on its side, the transcendental demand becomes the imperial encounter. The non-identical stranger dispossessing the self becomes the colonial subject in the worldly clash of civilizations. The dramatic ethical question confronting our world today is surely not that of the cosmic relation between the individual and the countenance of the abstract Other, but that between the world in which we live and the other worlds with which we share the globe. When we move beyond our comfort zone, we face the crucial problems of justice and of survival. These are the issues of nationalism and globalism, of identity and diversity, of rootedness, situatedness, and multiculturalism. I propose to call this the terrain of horizontal ethics. It is horizontal because it entails going beyond borders, traveling to other countries and other spheres, if not physically, then psychically. Horizontal, global ethics are excursive. They took their rise when Adam and Eve left Paradise to wander the world. Paradise was transcendent, located on the top of an unscalable mountain, but humans fell out of it when they entered history. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has been telling us for some years now that the global world is flat. To be sure, it takes a cosmic perspective to flatten the world that we know. You might think of Frankenstein. The novel envisions a clash of civilizations, with the humans of Old Europe terrified at the prospect of a race of monsters engendered in the wilds of South America. What makes the ethics of Frankenstein horizontal is the lack of barriers between realms: it is because the monster can scale the Alps and cross the seas without let or hindrance that the novel threatens a clash of races and of civilizations. Franco Moretti has written of the monster as a figure of the proletariat,

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but to us today, and in its vast extent, it looks like the proletarian hordes of the third world, threatening us from outside and not from below. Horizontal ethics, then, belong to the world of the epic and, in the modern imagination, to the myths that have come to stand in for bardic verse. Horizontal ethics are a massive moral and political burden on all of us, and they are in the news constantly, when terrorists level tall buildings or when Danish cartoons provoke riots halfway across the world. They are couched in the mode of Self and Other. To be sure, many of those concerned with cultural ethics want to move past the us-and-them mentality, but the goal is hard to reach.4 Edward Said’s Orientalism is a case in point. While one may debate the execution, there is no doubt that the book pleads insistently for nuance and differentiation in the treatment of Islamic cultures. To that end, the telltale term “the Other” does not ever occur in the main text, so far as I can see. Yet the Preface added in 2003 falls right back into the mode. In praising Goethe and Auerbach for their openness, Said writes: “Thus the interpreter’s mind actively makes a place in it for a foreign Other. And this creative making of a place for works that are otherwise alien and distant is the most important facet of the interpreter’s philological mission” (xxv).5 “Alien and distant” are the mar_____________ 4

5

Though her critical agenda is different from my focus on engagement, Rey Chow offers a related critique of reductive consolidations of otherness: “In the name of studying the West’s ‘others,’ then, the critique of cultural politics that is an inherent part of both poststructural theory and cultural studies is pushed aside, and ‘culture’ returns to a coherent, idealist essence that is outside language and outside mediation” (9, her italics). See also p. 73, quoting Toril Moi: “‘The most painful sting of patriarchy’ […] is ‘the solidarity against the other.’” Other examples of reduction are Jan Mohamed’s well-known notion of Manichean allegory and Jameson’s equally influential proposal to regard all third-world literature as national allegory. Indeed, Jameson puts a Chinese modernist, a Spanish realist, and a contemporary Senegalese writer all in the single category of third-world literature. For an articulate rebuttal see Attridge, J. M. Coetzee, esp. 104-5: “The ethical involves an always contextualized responsiveness, and responsibility, to the other (as singular) and to the future (as unknowable), while the political would be the real of generalizations, programs, and predictions.” Spelling “other” with a small o marks a big difference from Jan Mohamed’s and Jameson’s “Others.” Singularity is the theme of a companion book by Attridge (Singularity, see esp. “Responsibility and Ethics” 123-31) that is more general and, in my opinion, less probing. There is one reference on p. 21 in the original text (published 1978) to “a threatening Otherness” (Aeschylus’s Persians). And the 1994 “Afterword” says: “The construction of identity […] involves the construction of opposites and ‘others’ whose actuality is always subject to the continuous interpretation and re-interpretation of their differences from ‘us.’ Each age and society re-creates its ‘Others.’ Far from a static thing then, identity of self or of ‘other’ is a much worked-over historical, social, intellectual, and political process that takes place as a contest involving individuals and institutions in all societies” (Said 332). The original text argues for complex and manifold identities; the Afterword acknowledges “otherness” (once capitalized, twice—including the unquoted sequel—lower-case) as a negative, produced by Foucauldian disciplining; the late Preface recognizes Otherness as a constitutive principle, which it is our principal “mission” to admit. Said appears to have

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kers of horizontal ethics. Reducing distance is the task, turning the Other into more of the Same. The great mythic text for horizontal ethics is Robinson Crusoe. The oceanic world is flat, the island less so. For years hills protect Crusoe from discovering the Others just out of view. He dreams of companionship and eventually, in a parody of the human need for language, he trains a parrot to speak as part of the bestial “family” surrounding him, which also includes his “old and crazy” dog, two cats, and, in the barnyard, a dozen goats (Defoe 157). But eventually he descends to a beach where, dramatically, he encounters a single footprint. The isolated trace is the mark of the Other, and far more uncanny for being single. In the popular imagination, the footprint is the sign of the individual Crusoe is to meet and to dominate as his colonized servant. There are at least three books entitled Friday’s Footprint. But the mysteriously isolated footprint is not Friday’s; it belongs to the Other in the abstract, not to any individual. Crusoe retreats after seeing it for an extended interval of haunted terror. Only subsequently does he renew his explorations and discover the tribe of cannibals who frequent an unvisited side of the island. It is on this later excursion that he rescues Friday from them. Yet one could hardly call the encounter either a philological or an ethical triumph. For it is a meeting of unequals leading only to subjection. Friday is forced to learn to communicate in Crusoe’s language, and he does so too imperfectly to realize his autonomy. His first English word is “Master,” and eventually he learns to utter sentences like “They more many than my nation in the place where me was” (216) and (his last utterance in the novel), “no gun but shoot great much long arrow” (291). One cannot speak with an idiot, and the slave or servant in what Mary Louise Pratt calls the “monarch-of-all-I-survey scenario” is hardly less disadvantaged than were Crusoe’s parrot and dog. J. M. Coetzee merely draws the consequences in his sequel Foe when he makes his Cruso’s Friday a tongueless babbler. As Gayatri Spivak pointedly says in her shrewd analysis of Foe, the anti-imperialist “who wants to give the native voice” does not redeem the colonialist “who gives the native speech,” for the true native inhabits “a space of withholding, marked by a secret that may not be a secret but cannot be unlocked” (187, 190). The agency of the native who is genuinely independent resists dialogue. If transcendental ethical responsibility requires merely a face (or abstract faciality) and a stance, horizontal ethical encounter thus requires a language. To know the Other requires learning his idiom, finding common _____________ caved in to Foucault. For a passionate critique of Auerbach followed by an eloquent defense of Said’s devotion to Auerbach, see Apter 41-81.

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ground as the basis for agreement. “Man is a wolf to men,” as the proverb runs; to reach a higher plane one must conquer bestiality with intelligent acknowledgment. Communication is the premise on which mutuality can be built. Jürgen Habermas is the best-known apostle of communicative ethics, a system that naturally presupposes communication. As Lévinas preaches cosmic peace, so Habermas promises civic calm. But global problems cannot be solved on a communicative level. Habermas’s vision of a civic polity premises the unity it conceives as its result. “The actor,” he writes, “is both at once: he is the initiator who masters situations with responsible actions; at the same time he is also the product of traditions in which he stands, of affinal [solidarischen] groups to which he belongs, and of socialization processes in which he grows up” (Habermas, Moralbewußtsein 146). The basis for Habermas’s reasoning is an overarching empiricism with no room for confusions of identity. We are shaped by the world to which we all belong, we share it, and so we inevitably remain in solidarity with it and, in the last analysis, with one another. “Therefore individuals, who cannot acquire and assert their individuality other than via the appropriation of traditions, membership in social groups, and participation in socializing interactions, have an open choice between communicative and strategic action only in an abstract sense, that is, from case to case” (112). Here the unargued premises come into the open: there can be no individuality except through pre-existing groups, the multiple determinants of the socially formed individual are presumed to exist in solidarity and never in conflict with one another, and above all ethical cases are termed abstractions rather than the very material of ethics. On the last point, Habermas is unambiguous: the ideal of a communicative ethics is not to be soiled by application: “The postulate of discourse ethics, just like other postulates, cannot solve the problems of its own application” (114). The rationalist ideal of transparent communication and universal understanding at the end of time is merely the flip side of Frankenstein’s nightmare of monstrous hordes overrunning us from the pampas. There are no perfectly level playing fields either to condemn or to redeem us. The spoiler in Habermas’s ethical system, as in Defoe’s, is language. It is not a topic for him. Slippages and resistances in communication are thus implicitly presumed to be merely pragmatic and casual bumps in the road. (Indeed, the mongrel, English-laced German that Habermas increasingly writes is an emblem of the dream of communication without bounds, but only to the extent that more Anglicisms can be equated with more universality.) Since Habermas does not discuss language when he theorizes communication, I will instance a commentator on him who does:

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Learning the language and learning what and how the world is are bound together. To say that we agree about how the world is or that there is a consensus over the meaning of particular terms presents the wrong image of how language and world are related. We can argue about how many cookies are in the jar because our world, the very idea of us having a world at all, is already populated with cookies and jars with words designating them. (Bernstein 217)6

There is much to be suspicious of in a formulation like this one. It is vague about the relationship between consensus and argument; it misleadingly equates meaning (“how the world is”) and being; it smugly predicates definite counters constituting a quantified world, overlooking that there are many parts of the world where cookies exist only as a distinctly exotic culinary item and as a technical term known only to those who can afford a computer. Its last sentence is not even grammatically well-formed. If your ethical problems are limited to cookie theft, then maybe a communicative ethics on this model will help. But when cultures clash, the problems often derive from incompatible concept-formations and value systems. One man’s cookie is another man’s poison. The logical lapses here are accentuated by a cultural or ethical lapse in the author, for there is no sign in this book about linguistic agreement and consensual worlds that the author knows any German. Some German titles and phrases are given, but only when cited by others. Communication becomes a one-way street dead-ending in the UK. I think we need to do better.7 Communication is not easy, however. Worrying about communication on a global or intercultural scale is vital, to be sure. But we must not mislead ourselves into imagining that the large scale is the only decisive one, let alone that it is the proper learning ground. In the news at the moment are confrontations between us--Westerners--and them--Muslims. But Iraqis and Iranians do not get along easily, nor Shia with Sunni, nor Catholics and Protestants (in Northern Ireland, for instance), nor Orthodox Jews with Reform Jews, nor … Indeed, there is no point of rest at which we can say that communication opens unhindered.8 Robinson Cru_____________ 6

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Despite Bernstein’s assumption of universality, translating “cookie jar” into German isn’t easy, as I have confirmed with numerous native speakers. “Gebäckdose” exists, but one thinks of tin rather than porcelain, and “Gebäck” is more cake-like. Surely, Bernstein writes of cookie jars because they are proverbial in English as common property, not to be raided. Whether or not one can agree on a German equivalent, in the absence of the proverbial association Bernstein’s example phrase is bound to mystify. No better instance could be given of the routine unportability of cultural assumptions. See Arac for a recent, language-focused reflection and proposal. Without mentioning Habermas, Taylor’s Ethics of Authenticity develops similar ideals and betrays similar shortcomings. The goal is “a climate of common understanding” (100), to be reached through dialogue and mutual recognition (43-53). Taylor invokes Bakhtin, but his talk of horizons sounds more like Gadamer and bypasses the notion of divergent diver-

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soe was not so comfortable with his parents; that is why he left on his voyages in the first place. Fontane’s Koseleger, in my epigraph, is nothing like—a frequent image in Fontane—a Chinaman in Germany; instead, he is “deplaciert” (the speaker uses the French word for “displaced”) because he doesn’t like the village he finds himself in, with its ugly-sounding name of Quaden-Hennersdorf.9 Even home can be a foreign country. That is the message of Jacques Derrida’s little book, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin. A Jewish-French-Algerian, Derrida’s “native language” or (in a phrase he also scrutinizes) his “mother tongue” is itself tensed and riven. For language is never one’s own; it always comes to one from outside. Hence he writes of an “a priori universal truth of an essential alienation in language—which is always of the other—and, by the same token, in all culture” (Derrida 58).10 It is often as difficult to communicate with one’s neighbor as with a distant alien, and so the problems of a communicative ethics begin at home. It is fine and dandy to do good in Borrioboola-Gha, but not if it means overflying and overlooking Tom-All-Alone’s. Indeed, local failings are often masked or excused by cosmic imperatives. A Renaissance moralist phrases the paradox with eloquence: “Men fear wild beasts but have no fear of smaller animals such as mosquitoes or flies; still, because these insects are constant pests, men complain more often about them than about wild beasts.”11 Transcendental ethics are a matter for constant self-discipline, horizontal ethics are crucial in times of crisis, but we delude ourselves if we think we can solve large problems without solving small ones. We need to learn to communicate better in our own language, on the home front. I propose to call this third stage of my argument vertical ethics. By this I mean that we do not need even to go out the door in order to be presented with problems of ethical attitude and ethical communication. Within the house where we dwell others also live: domestic partners, children, parents, neighbors. You enter another room—or, more prototypically, you ascend or descend a floor—and others are living with different _____________

9 10 11

sity entailed by Bakhtin’s “multivoicedness” (which is too pacific a translation for the sharper-edged Russian word raznorechie). While language is a component of Taylor’s thought, it is so only in terms of “the help our languages of personal resonance can give us” in romantically expressing the inexpressible (90). The book’s conclusion, “Against Fragmentation” (109-121) is like Habermas in presuming the viability of the solution it imagines, though Taylor is at least more open about it. Fontane’s novel Effi Briest is rife with local communication problems like those I allude to here; for a compact discussion see my “Multum in Parvo.” In “Multum,” n. 5, I mention the case of a character who doesn’t even understand songs in her native dialect. Giovanni della Casa, Galateo, quoted in Weinrich 125. The lesser ethics are the subject of most of the other essays in this collection.

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customs, expectations, habits of thought, modes of behavior. Vertical ethics are the practices needed to live in harmony with those who live exactly where you live, those who differ from you ever so slightly, yet in a world where diacritics can be critical. In one of his formulations, Habermas predicates “discourse ethics” on “the autonomy of unique individuals and their prior embeddedness in intersubjectively shared forms of life” (Hermeneutics 49).12 Derrida’s meditation deconstructs autonomy and uniqueness, and in what follows I propose to interrogate shared embeddedness as well. Transcendental and horizontal ethics are for big thinkers with big ideas. Reach for the stars. Vertical ethics are for casuists. General principles need not apply; only fine-tuned cases work, continuously adjusted. For that reason I recommend turning from the abstract maxims of moral and political philosophy to the imagined specifics of literary representation. Literary works offer us countless examples of the operations of the vertical in the ethical domain. Travel up or down and new forms of life open up, not always expected, not always easy. I don’t have any answers. Rather, I shall merely suggest the multiplicity of configurations that constitute the irreducible problematic of daily life. As Bruce Robbins has sagely written in his beautifully titled book Feeling Global, internationalism is “a rhetorical and political enterprise […] that oddly joins ethical urgency with aesthetic and geocultural distance, normative pressure with emotional eccentricity, self-privileging with the impulse to expand the geography of democracy”(15). “All universalisms are dirty” is his maxim in his chapter on Mary Louise Pratt and on “the weird heights of cosmopolitanism” (75, 77). Nothing will bring us cleanly down to earth. Still, looking closer to the ground gives us a better shot at the mosquitoes and the flies. To that end, I propose the modest typology of vertical ethics that follows, beginning with the biggest, noisiest house flies, those we would gladly whoosh away, and moving toward less noisome, less noisy, subtler flyspecks on our domestic ethics. _____________ 12

Agnes Heller’s strange tract, Das Alltagsleben: Versuch einer Erklärung der individuellen Reproduktion, likewise presumes the social constitution of individual experience, leading (in her analysis) to a rigorous tendency toward suppressing particularity. The book’s longest section (118-41) concerns morality, but is almost entirely devoted to the subsumption of daily experience under general patterns. Dailiness is here defined, from the opening pages, as repetition, and particularity appears only with the negative coloration of willful partiality. On the problem of applying ethical norms to cases Heller has only a brief and uninformative paragraph (2.2.2.4; p. 123). As for verticality, a later paragraph (4.2.4.2; p. 299) asserts that higher is better than lower, which is an odd judgment for an avowed Marxist and the kind of overgeneralization my essay attempts to complicate. Daily life challenges the kind of Kantian ethical postulates that Habermas and Heller share because it so notably and rewardingly fluctuates.

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Some of our neighbors and housemates, after all, are very troublesome. We call them skeletons in the closet. The novelistic prototype, from which the idiom traces its popularity, is Lady Clara Newcome, beset by a cruel and unforgiving husband in “Barnes’s Skeleton Closet,” ch. 55 of Thackeray’s novel The Newcomers. But those we most want to keep out of sight are generally kept not in a closet but in an attic. Up in the attic are those with whom we cannot or would not speak, consequently with whom ethical relationships are cut off. They haunt the house of ethics as the bad conscience of the local (or vertical) in its anxieties about the big monsters, the global (or vertical) and the transcendental. Bertha Mason, the madwoman in Rochester’s attic in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is literature’s most famous attic-dweller. She laughs—a “curious laugh” that, with familiarity, becomes a “demoniac laugh”—she shrieks more fearfully than “the widest-winged condor on the Andes,” she shows a “savage face” like “the foul German spectre—the Vampyre,” and eventually she burns down the house and blinds her miserable husband (108, 149, 208, 286). Before completely losing her mind she beset Rochester with “the continued outbreaks of her violent and unreasonable temper” (310). But she doesn’t speak. The only language reported of her is “a fouler vocabulary” than any harlot that is compared to “wolfish cries” (312). The cruel and brutal insanity of the maniac lives above the beloved Rochester and besets him as an allegory of the primal curse troubling all ethical relations. The “fearful […] curses those propensities entailed on me” (310) are the “birth”-right evoked by Bertha Mason’s first name and embedded in the “mason”-ry out of which our civilizations are constructed. Bertha Mason is a mixed-race colonial who came from far away, but she haunts the metropolitan psyche. Thus do the stark conflicts of the horizontal ethics of the Other beset the vertical conflicts of the same. Bertha Mason, then, may be taken to reflect the insoluble combustibility of even local problems, the occlusion of otherness within the monolingual community, the limits of ethical possibility, the repressions that constitute paternal authority. The vexed interpretive question in this novel is a moral dilemma: how should we deal with the ethical unconscious? The novel’s happy ending follows Bertha’s exorcism and Rochester’s redemption to partial vision and tempered authority. A secondary character, St. John—to judge from the names, Jane’s transcendental double—pursues a mission to India, where he does good works but will never marry. Brontë offers, that is, two outcomes, both imperfect. It can be accused of treating too airily both the horizontal problematic bedeviling Rochester’s first marriage and the vertical one besetting the second marriage, yet its compromises can also be viewed as pragmatic recognitions. Written deep in the interior of England, Jane Eyre’s house-cleaning may not kill all the wild

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animals nor exterminate all domestic pests, and it notably ends without the prospect of future bliss that a first-person narrator ought to be well positioned to offer. But it at least permits envisioning wholesomer lives than Jane experienced as a girl.13 It is a vivid portrayal of ethical problems with an honest reticence about the completeness and durability of their solutions. The intolerable figure in the attic need not be alien. Henrik Ibsen’s late play John Gabriel Borkman features a convicted financier who following his release from prison remains self-exiled, invisibly pacing the upper floor of his estranged wife’s home. In a paranoid world, he is the supreme paranoid, refusing to understand or be understood even on the fateful night of the play when he does emerge and speak: “That is the curse we exceptional, chosen people have to bear. The common herd—the average man and woman—they do not understand us” (Ibsen 104; act 2). On a snowy night, an emotional storm engulfs the family and neighbors suddenly brought together in a precipitating crisis. In their self-absorption the family members and neighbors all talk past one another; none has enough stable common sense to right matters. Finally Borkman breaks out into the wide, cold world: “Out into the storm of life, I tell you.” His onceloved, still-loved sister-in-law tries to hold him back; his wife refuses: “I will not try to hold anyone in all the world. Let them go away from me …! As far—as far as ever they please” (Ibsen 137; end of act 3). But without vertical stability, the horizontal problems are overwhelming, and Borkman collapses in the cold. Ibsen’s play closes with the hated wife and her forlornly loved sister standing over the corpse: “two shadows—over the dead man” (Ibsen 149; act 4). The play’s moral is implied by the title of an impressive collection of essays related to my topic, Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society. Harpham’s upbeat tone shadows forth an ethical “hidden essence of literature,” a literary “home for itself in the dark,” and a “chiaroscuro […] generous and humane respect of life in its striving and imperfection” (ix-x). But the skeleton in Ibsen’s closet is grimmer than anything in Harpham’s imagination; the women that shadow his are not redeemable by an “intimate and dynamic engagement with otherness” (Harpham x). Harpham’s endeavor is limited by its monochromatic notion of otherness, where “the claims of otherness” (26) are subsumed _____________ 13

Jean Rhys’s prequel, Wide Sargasso Sea, evokes large-limbed horizontality in its title, but the text never alludes to the title, the book’s actual seas are speckled with islands (Dominica, Jamaica, Martinique, England), and its moral resolutely complicates all social binarisms: white and black, rich and poor, old and young, sane and mad, kin and stranger. Both Rhys and Brontë, as I read them, want to purge the specter of the madwoman in the attic in order to install more locally sensitive behavior and judgment.

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within a section with the only partly ironic title “Ethics Itself” (Harpham 26-32). Ibsen’s play is fringed with shadowy problems of public ethics: the civic responsibility that Borkman’s vaguely defined crimes have violated, the cultural mores threatened by a pretended party that appears to be the cover for an assignation. But for Ibsen the problems of the nation (Borkman was once in line for a government ministry) and of the community appear subordinated to the problems of the psyche. In this play vertical ethics trump horizontal ethics. Ethics can never be more than shadowy because human behavior must be regulated not by rules that always prove unenforceable but by a civility and decency Ibsen never seems able to imagine. According to Harpham (35-37) literary plot serves the ethical function of educing meaning: “Understanding the plot of a narrative, we enter ethics” (37). But Ibsen’s play is virtually plotless; it proceeds merely by rehashing a past that remains all but unexplained and totally unsettled. Hence the spatial allegory outlasts the temporal exposition. Yes, Borkman does descend the staircase, but he remains spiritually nude and vulnerable. He cannot leave the moral attic he has entered. A broader horizon will not solve the tangled vertical problems of interpersonal encounter and psychic order. The intractable dilemmas of the moral attic are the evident subject of Kafka’s The Trial. Even the German word for attic sounds like an oxymoron: Dachboden, roof-floor. The courtroom to which K. is mysteriously summoned is a fifth-floor space with a gallery up under the roof; the attic chancelleries are littered with junk, an unbreathable atmosphere, vertigo that carries over even into the cathedral. The ethical allegory is too selfevidently pertinent to need explanation here, too complex too elucidate in a brief space. What can be pointed out is the persistence of verticals and horizontals, of a morality of (bad) conscience and an ethics of (corrupt) duty. In the brief final chapter, where K. is summoned by his executioners, he looks down through the window at the darkened street, resists his captors while descending the stairs but gives in to them on the street. Even out of doors, the streets are steep, and his friend Fräulein Bürstner appears ascending an urban staircase; then they pass out of the city and into the moonlight only to enter a quarry underneath whose walls K. is murdered. Here too, then, the vertical dominates the horizontal; the impersonal subverts the interpersonal; the uninterpretable call of the unpardonable sin (an explicit topic in Ibsen’s play) frustrates any orderly meeting of minds or cultures. The problems of vertical ethics are infinitely petty, yet here they do seem infinite as well. K. is not a corrupt financier like Borkman but a conscientious clerk, but that doesn’t help. He is an everyman, embroiled in the everyday, the ethical oxymorons of domestic, vertical experience. He ends done in by poisonous insects.

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Healthy contact is not possible with the excluded world of the attic. But contact remains difficult even with normal floors, normal inequities, normal estrangements. Physically the distances are incomparably smaller than with horizontal travel, but spiritually and morally then can still be insuperable. The traditional means of vertical access is the staircase. But even where staircases do not lead to terrifying mysteries like those in The Trial, they can be difficult contact zones. Staircases in apartment houses are public spaces.14 You meet neighbors and strangers on staircases. They are border territory, inside the building but outside the residence. Often dark and yet exposed, they can signal risk and endangerment. Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov mounts a staircase to commit his murder, then trembles at the traffic mounting them behind him, at noises and silences, at unwelcome visitors. Along a public stairway secrets come into the open. And because stairwells are no one’s property, they manifest the improprieties kept out of our residences and troubling our relations. On the street, out in the open, you can generally meet people openly or avoid them without conflict; on the stairs you pass them uncertainly and, in fiction, often furtively. Emile Zola’s L’assommoir is the great novel of the staircase. Zola’s fatalistic naturalism seems a tough case for ethical casuistics. Destiny looms overhead, and there is no light at the end of the tunnel. At least, there is no light evident in Zola’s darker novels. Yet the culmination of the Rougon-Macquart series, Le Docteur Pascal, compensates with a redemptive vitalism. The novel is doctrinaire, prolix, and over-generalized, but it encourages reading its predecessors against their surface grain. The staircases in the various dwellings inhabited by Gervaise Macquart in her journey from prosperity to prostitution reflect the morals of the inhabitants. They are broadly symbolic – clean or dirty as are the bodies and minds of those who use them. The author in general and this novel in particular are famous for this kind of “realistic,” metonymic symbolism. But the novel’s numerous staircases are also allegorical: they are sites of staged interactions. (Symbolism, with its translucence of the eternal in and through the temporal, is the vehicle of the grander ethics; in their more particular moments, novels work more comfortably with more _____________ 14

Sharon Marcus’s fine Apartment Stories avoids public interiors, including the staircases which are “hermetically sealed” (170) in the Zola novel she analyzes, Pot-bouille. Marcus’s perspective is sociological and its values are couched in terms of morals which one either observes or infringes, in a world that is defined by rigid alternatives (such as British semi-detached houses vs. Parisian apartments) or their collapse: “every inside must have an outside that compromises pure interiority,” as she says of Zola on her last page (198). My very different focus is on ethical nuance, in a world of overlapping problematics. Thus, for instance, as my examples show, however different the architecture in Britain and France, their staircases raise related complexes of interpersonal encounter.

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limited allegories, as I shall be illustrating.) Here, for instance, is the wedding party testing its morals in the Vendôme column. In the tight spiral of the staircase, the twelve climbed in a line, stumbling against the worn steps, holding on to the walls. Then, when the darkness grew total, came the guffaws. The ladies uttered little cries. The gentlemen tickled them, pinched their legs […]. However, they didn’t go over the line; they knew where they needed to stop, for decency’s sake. (Zola 95)

In the public monument, on a good day, the stairs validate public morals. Closer to home, there is, paradoxically, more exposure and more risk, as when Gervaise feels her labor coming on. In the staircase she had so sudden an attack that she had to sit down right in the middle of the steps; and she pressed her two fists against her mouth so as not to cry, since she felt ashamed to be found there by any men who might happen to be coming up. (117)

And so it goes. The stairs do not just represent or reflect the state of the soul; rather, they are often the place where action happens--not decisive turns of the melodramatic plot, but the meaning-filled passages of daily life. Zola’s plot as a whole can be summed up with a single word that recurs many times in the novel, “tumble” (in French, “dégringoler”). The tumbling is economic, social, psychological; in all three of these aspects collective, symbolic, and metonymic. The mud or slime into which Gervaise and the others tumble is a figure of speech, and their fall into abjection, exclusion, and self-destructive drunkenness is a judgment on them and on their world. Naturalism propounds a tight weave of cause and effect, appearing to leave little room for the complexity of negotiated encounter that is the province of vertical ethics. One accidental, abrupt, traumatic fall from a roof, and everything follows inexorably. Hence descents are imaged as tumbles, even when only a few steps or a bit of childish horseplay are involved; even the slightest trip is a fall. Yet Zola’s genius in his better novels, in contrast to his imitators, lies in his ability to individualize reactions and even to personalize his crowds. And so even the staircase to hell or to solitude is paved with the good and bad intentions of a populated world. So it is at the novel’s climax. Gervaise visits her husband Coupeau, confined to a hospital in terminal alcoholic delirium. She rushes out. To be sure, she cannot avoid her destined catastrophe, which overtakes her a few months later, at the end of the same chapter. But for the moment she remains linked to others. “Then, she escaped. But it was no use tumbling down the stairs, all the way down she heard the damned racket her husband was making” (487). And she heads to her friends, where she encounters people to share and also to mock her grief. She returns to the hospital, where, “From the bottom of

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the stairs, she heard Coupeau’s song” (489). Commerce, responsibility, and human recognition extend from the top to the bottom of the social ladder. Hence even the insistent tumbling demands acknowledgment as a worldly phenomenon: not a merely inward symbol but a public allegory on many levels of meaning and response. Allegorical-ethical staircases abound in fiction, naturally. There are furtive back stairs, ambitious or condescending front stairs, and of course ladders to trysts such as Julien Sorel uses to reach Mme Rênal in The Red and the Black. It is surely not necessary to examine instances in detail. The point is the role of the vertical dimension in bringing differentiated individuals together in ethical encounter. Steps make all the difference: that is, nuances rather than fields. A step gives moral elevation to the crucial encounter in Henry James’s Spoils of Poynton: “From her step she looked down into his raised face. ‘Ah, you see it’s not true that you’re free’”— though in the tangled Jamesian world the step up is also “a step backward.”15 Goethe’s Elective Affinities opens poised between a straight path toward the heights that passes through a cemetery and a new, more gently winding one, though they join for the final, steep and awkward climb: an emblem for the difficulties that improvements to the park cannot circumvent. And an imaginary staircase marks an ethical void. Of Mrs. Sparsit in Hard Times Dickens writes: “She was a most wonderful woman for prowling about the house. How she got from story to story was a mystery beyond solution” (147). The following chapter is entitled “Mrs. Sparsit’s Staircase,” but the allegorical staircase is an engine of destruction, not a meeting and testing ground: “She erected in her mind a mighty Staircase, with a dark pit of shame and ruin at the bottom; and down those stairs, from day to day and hour to hour, she saw Louisa coming” (154). Affery Flintwinch, in Dickens’s Little Dorrit, purportedly dreams a staircase at the bottom of which her evil husband meets his double; when the dreams prove a cover for actual spying, the plot is uncovered and the crime is righted. Ethical staircases function allegorically rather than symbolically because the real case points toward a principle of action rather than toward a transcendent principle of attitude or belief. As James Joyce’s story “The Dead” winds down, Gabriel Conroy stands in a dark part of the hall gazing up the staircase. A woman was standing near the top of the first flight, in the shadow also […]. It was his wife. […] There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked

_____________ 15

James’s scene here seems cognizant of the narrator’s advice in George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss 1.8: “If a man means to be hard, le him keep in his saddle and speak from the height, above the level of pleading eyes.” The principle is tragically enacted in Robert Frost’s poem “Home Burial.”

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himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. (209-10)

Certain styles of reading Joyce, psychological or mythic, take the details to be symbols, as the would-be angel Gabriel does. But the moment is followed by a page of tense, sometimes rude small talk. The characters are learning or practicing, always with awkwardness and imperfect success, to level with one another. Gretta Conroy is another shadow of ethics, symbolizing a dark problem but living in a crowded, multi-leveled society. And there are countless other figures of vertical ethics where unequals meet. The balcony where Romeo and Juliet break free of their feuding families, the window from which Chérubin/Cherubino jumps toward freedom (only to sprain his ankle in the flatland of a flower border, called “plate-bande” in French) or that from which Mélisande’s hair hangs down toward the embrace of Pélléas, Stephen Dedalus’s tower at the opening of Ulysses. There are countless such, as I say; I have purposely instanced verticals that might seem metaphysical—like ivory towers—but that still do not lack realistic specificity. Of particular interest is E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story, “The Cousin’s Corner Window.” In this plotless sketch, an invalid trains his writer cousin to scrutinize a crowd from above. After the writer has dashed up the stairs “like lightning” (‘mit Blitzesschnelle’ 598), the view from above first appears only a horizontal sprawl. But the view from above allows him to follow the paths of individuals and to profit from the enforced patience of his cousin’s observation. The turbulent crowd proves to be a purposive assemblage of well-meaning citizens going about various kinds of business that the cousin has learned to distinguish and to explain, with sympathy and good humor. The crowd is a file that smooths the rough edges of the citizens jostling for space while conducting their affairs. And so, by the end, the undifferentiated mass turns out to be a well-ordered polity. “I know,” the cousin says, enthusiastic rigorists, hyperpatriotic ascetics agitate furiously against this increased external decency of the people and claim that with this polishing of manners the national spirit [das Volkstümliche] is polished away and lost. For my part, I am of the firm, fervent conviction that a people can never lose its character by treating both natives and foreigners not with coarseness or scornful condescension but with politeness. (Hoffmann 620-21)

The cousin’s infirmity prevents the vertical relationship from becoming a practical encounter; at the same time, it enables him to gain a theoretical and ethical advantage over those whose relations are horizontal and hasty. What is the unschooled writer doing in this sketch? Why might it not work with greater poetic efficiency as a solitary, first-person meditation, in the manner of Hawthorne’s far more sentimental “Sights from a Steeple”?

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Hoffmann’s cousin, after all, does most of the talking. Impressively articulate, he hardly seems to need an amanuensis, let alone a ghost-writer. But the distribution of roles here is allegorical rather than realistic, signifying rather than causally motivated. Only the man whose proper medium is language—not the one (however adept of tongue) whose proper medium is observation—can carry Hoffmann’s narrative to its intended goal. For, as my examples have illustrated from the start, the heart of an ethical encounter is language. Hoffmann’s uncharacteristically placid story can end with a moment of intensity when the dialogue of his two characters transcends merely pedagogic social anatomy. ‘Yes, cousin!’ [the invalid] cried with a voice that penetrated my innermost being and filled it with a melancholy that cut to the heart, ‘yes cousin: et si male nunc, non olim sic erit!’ Poor cousin! (622)

The voice from the heart, the voice of humanity, speaks the language of the other. It can be a different tone of voice, a different dialect, a different protocol. It can also be, as here, a different language. But in the translation zone, the language of the other cannot simply be transposed into the language of the same. Rather, it must be over-heard and under-stood in the particularity of its individual destiny. Hermeneutics is the heart of vertical ethics, located in the interstices where the counters of discourse fall short. Upstairs-downstairs, uptown-downtown, highlands-lowlands, high life-low life: on varying scales, the differences within our societies are frequently imaged as differences in altitude. “Presently,” says Eliot’s narrator in The Mill on the Floss, you find yourself in the seat you like best--a little above or a little below the one on which your goddess sits (it is the same thing to the metaphysical mind, and that is the reason why women are at once worshipped and looked down upon). (ch. 6.7)

At the core of both social cohesion and social mobility are the levels of language—the little proprieties or (as in Thackeray) the little vanities by which we distinguish others, or ourselves. As the pace of life speeded up in the twentieth century, so too did the social ladder. One intriguing figure is the allegorically unnamed elevator operator in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, who is generally designated “le lift” after the machine he runs in the snooty resort hotel at Balbec. Hailing from Monaco, small and ugly, he is a semi-outsider. Though never acknowledged as a racial Other, he is notable for his linguistic distortions, which he has in common with the other social climbing, semi-outsider Bloch (who says “laïft” for “lift”) (Proust 1:740; 3:682). Off duty, he functions as a bicycle messenger, amatory go-between, and—it is eventually revealed—sexual partner of the narrator’s ego ideal, Robert de Saint-

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Loup. “He belonged to that modern proletariat that wishes to erase all traces in language of the regime of service” (1:799). Gradually showing more and more facets, as so many of Proust’s characters do, he maps horizontal relations in the vertical dimension. Proust’s narrative also tracks advances in technology, and the elevator operator finishes his career with the acme of vertical mobility by landing a job in aviation. Not a prime player in Proust’s game, he is nevertheless the prototypical social shifter, a figure for the stresses and strivings of people in their uneven encounters with nearby others. Good manners, good listening, fly-swatting will not solve the great problems of the clash of civilizations. There are, certainly, wild beasts (or those we take to be such) around the corridors of daily life as well as beneath them. There are underground and invisible men lurking in the dens of Dostoevsky and of Ellison. The underground realms are powerful; yet it is important to recognize that they are also constrained. “The underground […] locates truths that cannot otherwise be said […], but it cannot thereby give them the depth or breadth of expression required of rational discourse […].The modern underground has undergone a remarkable variety of inflections of what is in fact a quite limited set of narrative and spatial choices” (Pike 18). The structure and limits of theorizing ethics are well articulated by some moments in Fredric Jameson’s Political Unconscious. His starting point is the assertion that “all ethics lives by exclusion and predicates certain types of Otherness or evil” (Jameson, Political Unconscious 60). In isolation, Jameson’s dictum here sounds transcendental. But a subsequent Nietzschean (or, indeed Frankensteinian) reading reveals the problems of Otherness as horizontal and cultural in a consciously political sense: “Surely, in the shrinking world of the present day, with its gradual leveling of class and national and racial differences, and its immanent abolition of Nature (as some ultimate term of Otherness or difference), it ought to be less difficult to understand to what degree the concept of good and evil is a positional one that coincides with categories of Otherness” (114-15). Ultimately, though, the ethics of Otherness is understood at yet a third level, as a drive located at the inescapable, unconscious navel of every individual mind: Briefly, we can suggest that, as Nietzsche taught us, the judgmental habit of ethical thinking, of ranging everything in the antagonistic categories of good and evil (or their other binary equivalents), is not merely an error but is objectively rooted in the inevitable and inescapable centeredness of every individual consciousness or individual subject: what is good is what belongs to me, what is bad is what belongs to the Other. (234)

But Nietzsche’s solution, the eternal return, is, Jameson says, “for most of us both intolerable in its rigor and unconvincingly ingenious in the presti-

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digitation with which it desperately squares its circle” (234). In this book, as in numerous others, Jameson preaches the need for a more fully worked “collective dialectic” (287). But the lesson of the buzzing insects of vertical ethics is that collectivity is the wrong way to begin. “Collective dialectic” is in fact an oxymoron, since the entire process of dialectic, in both Socrates and Hegel, aims at interrogating and complicating collective assumptions. Casuistics, which proves simply another name for literature, responds to Jamesonian Marxism with the relentless acknowledgment of “special circumstances,” so eloquently formulated in my third epigraph. Jameson falls short of his goal to the extent that he theorizes too much, and never as “briefly” as (for instance in the above quote) he promises. The vertical dimensions above ground are more fluid than any of the numerous transcendences or Othernesses I have surveyed. Less demarcated by rigid thresholds, vertical ethics is a shifting proving ground that precedes systems and should be a constant reminder of their imprecisions. One way to move toward the point that ethics begins at home is with the reminder that national conflict, which is horizontal and external, must not obscure class tension, which in its way is vertical and domestic. Slavoj Žižekhas said it well, in a recent book directed toward the subtle intangibles of human relations: “the class problematic of workers’ exploitation is transformed into the multiculturalist problematic of the ‘intolerance of Otherness,’” so that “the excessive investment of multiculturalist liberals in protecting immigrants’ ethnic rights clearly draws its energy from the ‘repressed’ class dimension” (10; his italics). The problems, he says, lie closer at hand and are more vertical than we often acknowledge. But indeed, they prove to be yet closer and yet subtly vertical than the class problematic acknowledges. Most of Žižek’s book is a study of ethics and politics, but it arrives at its title phrase only near the end, and there, at last, he writes in a spirit allied with the one I have been suggesting. For it is finally not even the consolidated upstairs-downstairs of class relations that concern him, let alone the “full identification with one’s own ethnic community” (129) that he spurns, but rather “something that appears to us in fleeting experiences—say, through the gentle smile of a beautiful woman, or even through the warm, caring smile of a person who may otherwise seem ugly and rude: in such miraculous but extremely fragile moments, another dimension transpires through our reality” (128). Finally, that is, class too stands in here for all uneven developments, all relationships of authority and subordination, including the manifold personal and private relationships evoked in my epigraph from Thackeray Žižek’ssentimentalism is part of his message and, taken together with its firm grounding in reality, related to mine. Our ethics take their start from

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the most intimate, most fragile encounters. The newly transpiring dimension is a realm not of symbolic greatness but of the infinitely small, perhaps a kind of transcendence from below. Such a vertical ethics—hermeneutic, individual, flexibly uneven—is the indispensable training ground for the grander, knottier, more intractable demands of horizontal and transcendental ethics.16

References Apter, Emily. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. Arac, Jonathan. “Global and Babel: Two Perspectives on Language in American Literature.” Emerson Society Quarterly 50 (2004): 95-119. Attridge, Derek. J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004. —: The Singularity of Literature. London: Routledge, 2004. Bernstein, J. M. Recovering Ethical Life: Jürgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory. London: Routledge, 1995. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Ed. Margaret Smith. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982. Brown, Marshall. “Multum in Parvo.” Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalism. Ed. Haun Saussy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006. Bruns, Gerald L. “The Coherence of Hermeneutics and Ethics.” Gadamer’s Repercussions: Reconsidering Philosophical Hermeneutics. Ed. Bruce Krajewski. Berkeley: U of California P, 2004. Chow, Rey. Ethics after Idealism: Theory, Culture, Ethnicity, Reading. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998. Critchley, Simon. “Introduction.” The Cambridge Companion to Levinas. Eds. Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. Ed. Angus Ross. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965. Derrida, Jacques. Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin. Trans. Patrick Mensah. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. Eds. George Ford and Sylvère Monod. New York: Norton, 1966. _____________ 16

My thanks to Ansgar Nünning, Astrid Erll and Herbert Grabes for the invitation and spur to think about ethics and to Ivan Kidoguchi for technical help and for pointing me towards Attridge and towards Frost.

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Habermas, Jürgen. Moralbewußtsein und kommunikatives Handeln. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1983. —: “Justice and Solidarity: On the Discussion Concerning ‘Stage 6.’“ Hermeneutics and Critical Theory in Ethics and Politics. Ed. Michael Kelly. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990. Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society. Durham: Duke UP, 1999. Heller, Agnes. Das Alltagsleben: Versuch einer Erklärung der individuellen Reproduktion. Ed. Hans Jonas. Trans. Peter Kain. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1978. Hoffmann, E.T.A. Späte Werke. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1971. Ibsen, Henrik. The Last Plays. Trans. William Archer. New York: Hill and Wang, 1959. James, Henry. The Spoils of Poynton. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981. —: “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social Text 15 (Autumn, 1986): 65-88. JanMohamed, Abdul. “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature.” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 59-87. Joyce, James. Dubliners. Ed Robert Scholes. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. 209-10. Lévinas, Emmanuel. “Visage et éthique.” Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité. Paris: Kluwer, 1997. 211-42. —: “Le Visage.” Ethique et infini: Dialogues avec Philippe Nemo. Paris: Fayard, 1982. 89-97. Marcus, Sharon. Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London. Berkeley: U of California P, 1999. Moretti, Franco. “Dialectic of Fear.” Signs Taken for Wonders. Trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller. London: Verso, 1983. 83-108. Pike, David L. Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London, 18001945. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2005. Proust, Marcel. A la recherche du temps perdu. 3 vols. Eds. Pierre Clarac and André Ferré. Paris: Gallimard, 1954. Robbins, Bruce. Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress. New York: New York UP, 1999. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Random House, 2003. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.

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Taylor, Charles. Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991. Weinrich, Harald. “Politeness and Sincerity.” The Linguistics of Lying and Other Essays. Trans. Jane K. Brown and Marshall Brown Seattle: U of Washington P, 2005. Žižek, Slavoj. The Fragile Absolute; or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? London: Verso, 2000. Zola, Emile. L’assommoir. Paris: Fasquelle, 1956.

RONALD SHUSTERMAN (BORDEAUX)

Agrammaticality, Silence and the Diffusion of Values:

The Holiday of Language

1. Introduction: Language on Holiday What follows will be a series of mixed remarks on ethics and literature—I use the term “mixed remarks” with Wittgenstein’s Culture and Value in mind, since the original German title of this posthumous work of the Cambridge master, Vermischte Bemerkungen, might perhaps be better translated in that way. Yet the volume does concern both culture and value, and it may turn out that it is wiser to offer mixed remarks than any systematic or supposedly exhaustive theory of the interrelations of ethics, culture, value and the arts. The aesthetics of “mixture” itself may be part of the message. In fact, Wittgenstein wrote little about literature and developed no explicit literary theory. But it may also turn out that this is because all of his philosophy is already implicitly directed to literature as a prime example of the power of language. In other words, it may be that Wittgenstein’s writing itself, instead of formulating any traditional argument on this subject, actually provides an experience of this power, demonstrating in its own way how ethics and culture intertwine. Wittgenstein is famous for his “therapeutic” vision of philosophy and to that extent all of his writings are “ethical” in a very broad sense of the term. In his battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence, he noted, for example, that “philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 38). Yet, one is tempted to ask, isn’t literature precisely that form of life where language is meant to go on holiday? Does this mean that literature is a form of bewitchment—a hindrance to our therapeutic endeavors? Secondly, how is this “holiday of language” to be connected to the question of value? In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein’s view on the question of value and expression is explicit: What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental. It must lie outside the world. 6.42 Hence also there can be no ethical propositions. Propositions cannot express anything higher. 6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics is transcendental

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(Ethics and æsthetics are one.) (Tractatus 183)

Perhaps it is because of this transcendental nature of value that no true theory of value is available, since how can one have a theory of that which is outside of the world and which cannot yield propositions? The problem, of course, is that Wittgenstein himself is formulating his own metapropositions, notably that ethics and aesthetics are one, and one wonders exactly what this means and whether it is not itself an ethical proposition of some sort, a statement or a credo concerning ethics and culture or ethics in culture. In this paper I hope to use a quick review of some Wittgensteinian positions to refine my own theory of the connections between agrammaticality or incorrectness and the ethical or metaethical dimension of literature. What exactly happens, and what do we learn, when language goes on holiday in this way? 2. Wittgenstein and Literary Theory, or from “Dichtung” to “Ducting” Wittgenstein gave us no literary theory but a general emphasis on the value of literature pervades his work. A typical remark can be seen in the following excerpt from Culture and Value dated 1933-34: “I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as poetic composition” (24e). A more common translation of the term Dichtung in the original statement gives us: “philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry.” Note that when I typed these terms into my computer, my spell-checker wanted to transform Dichtung into ducting. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that this might indeed be an apt metaphor for literary practice. But I’ll come back to the spell-checker later on. The question I’d like to ask at this point is, what does it mean to say that philosophy ought to be written as a form of poetry? To answer that question, one would need to have a clear idea of what Wittgenstein means when he refers to poetry. If meaning is use, as the Wittgensteinian slogan would have it, then one need only look at his use of the term. The problem is that his use varies, or rather that he says what seem to be widely differing things about what poetry is or what it does. Take for example this incidental remark in Culture and Value: “People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them—that does not occur to them” (Culture and Value 36e). For John Gibson, this implies that Wittgenstein subscribes here to a cognitive view of poetry. But the problem is that Wittgenstein also seems to endorse the opposite view: “Do not forget that a poem, even though it is composed in the lan-

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guage of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information” (Zettel, § 160).1 So how does one transcend this apparent contradiction? Gibson is going to argue that the two habitual views of literature, as giving us a representation of reality or as totally cut off from reality, are both wrong, and that there is a third possibility where literature can nevertheless conserve its cognitive dimension. In the same volume of articles, Joseph Margolis claims, however, that such contradictions need not be resolved, because, ultimately, Wittgenstein is simply of no use to the philosophy of art. My own response will be to argue that there is really no contradiction between these two quotations—between the idea of poetry as teaching us and the idea of poetry as not involving the language-game of information. There is no contradiction, that is, if we keep in mind the plasticity of the verb to teach. For what poets and musicians have to teach us may have more to do with value than with knowledge, and this may be the sense in which ethics and esthetics are one. In the previously quoted passage of the Tractatus, and in various other remarks, one finds in Wittgenstein what I would like to call a “Gödel’s Theorem of Practical Ethics”—the idea being that ethics involves a system whose foundation is necessarily indemonstrable within the system itself. Take the following two excerpts from Culture and Value: You cannot lead people to what is good; you can only lead them to some place or other. The good is outside the space of facts. (3e) Rules of life are dressed up in pictures. And these pictures can only serve to describe what we are to do, not to justify it. […] Religion says: Do this!—Think like that!—but it cannot justify this and once it even tries to, it becomes repellent; because for every reason offered there is a valid counter reason. (29)

Much of this discussion concerns of course the question of faith. But I see Wittgenstein implying in these remarks that the ethical is, necessarily, implicit or indirect in some way. This leads us to the intuition that ethics enters culture, or perhaps enters culture most efficiently and most profoundly, when it does so in an unusual way, not so much as overt statement but rather as experience. We get a sense of this in many of Stanley Cavell’s writings on Wittgenstein. One major article was called “‘The Investigations’ Everyday Aesthetics of Itself” (1996) and this title indeed is self-explanatory.2 The main idea is that the form of Wittgenstein’s writing is a meaningful gesture, a use of the power of aphorism as “perspicuous presentation,” as an experience analogous to the pleasure of proof, where we are finding our way again after having been lost, not by discovering something new but by under_____________ 1 2

Wittgenstein quoted in Gibson 109. Cavell’s article is reprinted in Gibson & Huemer 21-33.

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standing what is already before our eyes. This vision of Wittgensteinian philosophy as experience rather than statement is often applied to his early work as well. In a curious letter he sent to his prospective publisher, Ludwig von Flicker, Wittgenstein describes the Tractatus in the following way: My work consists of two parts, the one presented here plus all that I have not written. My book draws limits to the sphere of the ethical from the inside as it were, and I am convinced that this is the ONLY rigourous way of drawing those limits. In short, I believe that while many others today are just gassing, I have managed in my book to put everything firmly in its place by being silent about it. (Von Wright 83)

This sheds a new light on the famous seventh and final proposition of the Tractatus, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.” The point seems to be that the ethical is best “expressed” by some sort of absence of expression, perhaps by the very experience of this absence of expression. It is the unutterable, perhaps, which by its nature captures the ethical, since both the unutterable and value itself, as we have seen, lie outside of the world. This argument has been developed by two Wittgenstein specialists, David Schalkwyk and Cora Diamond. Schalkwyk quotes a letter from Wittgenstein where he praises a certain poem for its type of silence: “if only you do not try to utter what is unutterable then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be—unutterably—contained in what is uttered!” (Wittgenstein in Schalkwyk 56). For Diamond, the Tractatus involves an ethical experience precisely because it is not explicitly about ethics, because it is not the kind of hot air or “gassing” that Wittgenstein refers to in his letter to von Flicker. She develops the notion of “significant absence”—that is, the philosophical import of the experience provoked by the absence of something expected (Diamond 131). One should note that the techniques and presuppositions of people such as Stanley Fish or Wolfgang Iser are quite relevant here. Cavell, Diamond and Schalkwyk are arguing that there is a sense in which the Wittgensteinian text means what it does to you. This could indeed lead to a theory where the literary work of art is ethically important via these very absences themselves. It would be in this way that ethics might enter into culture, not only via explicit moral statement, but also via the operation of these silences. The problem, however, will be to find a criterion for distinguishing between “significant absence” and mere emptiness or frivolity. After all, to mention another Austrian, Arnold Schwarzenegger could also say that he has managed in his work to put all philosophy firmly in its place by simply being silent about it. So while I think that this concept of “significant absence” is promising, I shall pursue my analysis by examining the role of what we might call “significant error” or “significant mis-

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take”—a concept that will allow me to develop an esthetics of agrammaticality. My main examples will include Katherine Mansfield and Martin Amis—though a lot more could be done on the role of the unreliable narrator. Before I get to the examples, however, I need to work through some of the premisses of my position. 3. The Theory of Agrammaticality and the Category Mistake Language, in one sense, doesn’t like the new. Language—or I should really say linguistics—likes to classify and to sort things into pre-established categories with clear criteria and constraints. All thinking is classification—all thought is sorting (to use a slogan I.A. Richards put forth back in the 1930’s)—but grammar especially is the search for water-tight categories and strict rules. One way of looking at the Wittgensteinian undertaking is to see his emphasis on pluralism and the variety of language-games as an attempt to counter this stifling grammatical reflex. More recently, Quine’s famous “gavagai” thought experiment underlined the aporia of classification and translation. To remind you briefly, Quine imagines an anthropologist deep in the jungle who accompanies a tribal chief on his daily walks. The anthropologist notices several times that when the chief sees a rabbit running in the underbrush, he cries out, “Gavagai!” The Quinean argument is that the anthropologist is wrong to write down in his notebook “Gavagai equals rabbit,” since the chief could be saying “meat” or “dinner” or, if his tribe believes in leporine reincarnation, he might be saying, “Look, it’s Granddad!” Or, as one French linguist has pointed out, he might be using some verbal form such as “it’s rabbitting”—il lapine in French, and I suppose one could invent a verb that would mean to rabbit in German as well. Quine was arguing for a certain incommensurability between languages, but my own argument will have more to do with the way that art thrives on the aporia of classification. Now there have been times in the history of art where the goal was indeed classification and order. I won’t tire you with obvious examples, such as the Jardin à la française and so on. But, arguably, for some time now, art has been more concerned with de-classification, more interested in making unreal and in breaking up all existing categories. Such art exists, in many cases, to underline the plasticity of all categories, not just the categories of art. These works and practices are rhizomatic, one might say, in the sense of always inviting us to go somewhere else, to see things in a different way, to make unexpected connections. According to the “a-” or “anti-grammatical theory of art” that I would like to develop here, a work of art needn’t bow to system or predictability; the agrammatical theory

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conceives of the artwork as crossing boundaries, disrupting categories and moving in unforeseen directions, simply for the sake of the alterity involved. I will not claim that this agrammatical aesthetics holds for all periods in the history of art, but it does seem to define the current institution. In a recent call for papers for a French journal in the philosophy of art, Bernard Lafargue has underlined the overwhelming diversity of contemporary artistic practice: “Is aesthetics still possible today?” he asks, that is, is it possible when one thinks of the total breakdown of traditional categories: “Today, the artist can be a balneotherapist like Cai Guo Qiang, a masseuse like Marie-Ange Guilleminot, a pig breeder like Rosemarie Trockel or Carsten Höller […] a cook like Daniel Spoerri, a plastic surgeon like Orlan, a lighting engineer like James Turrell […] a singing sculpture like Gilbert and George” and so on (Lafargue 13). This diversity is an obstacle for those with essentialist urges. But it is not a problem for a pluralist or agrammatical aesthetics. Once you get rid of essentialism you no longer need to think of aesthetic theory as the search for a unique criteria of form or practice, though you do have to look for unifying criteria with respect to the institution as a whole. Our job is perhaps to theorize the diversity, and the historian of ideas might want to explain why we have developed this taste for the irrevocably Other. But the existence of this somewhat frenetic alterity does not spell the end of art nor that of aesthetics. My thesis is that art has become intentionally agrammatical in a sense; that is, it automatically tries to break the rules. There is a deep philosophical dimension in its relentless deconstruction of familiar categories. Grammar needs to persuade us that categories are solid; art wants to subvert them at times, or at least get us to question them. The Analytic philosopher Gilbert Ryle speaks disparagingly of what he calls the “category mistake” (Ryle 16). To adapt his own example, we can imagine someone who spends a day being guided around Oxford and says, “You’ve shown me the Library and the lecture halls, the offices and the colleges, but where is the University itself?” Ryle’s point is that there is no Other thing that is the university, and to ask for it is to make a category mistake; it is to misunderstand the concept involved. My argument is that the purpose of art is, in one sense, to encourage such “mistakes”— not to get us to misunderstand concepts, but to rearrange them in novel ways. In the case of art, the misuse of concepts is intentional, since the artwork is seeking alterity via the breaking of boundaries and the confusion of objects. Our modern anti-system of the arts3 points out the value _____________ 3

My expression is, of course, a sly reference to an influential study in aesthetics published in 1951 by P.O. Kristeller.

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of the category mistake. It is agrammatical, rhizomatic and indeed “zeugmatic” in a way, since it often forces a mixture of categories, using a single object in multiple ways, like Duchamp’s Fountain. In an intentional and literary zeugma, such as Wilde’s “Oh, flowers are as common here, Miss Fairfax, as people are in London,”4 what is a mistake at one level turns out to be revealing at another. A grammar is a series of constraining norms that not only try to describe language but also to control it; an agrammatical theory of art would describe without judging, without transforming itself into a Manifesto, as Arthur Danto would say. In their search for the completely different, the Monty Python group gave us numerous examples of totally unpredictable and unexplainable details. There is a famous sketch where John Cleese is asking his mother for a cup of tea when her best friend, a certain Mrs Niggerbaiter, explodes. When one looks at the detail of the sketch, there is absolutely no reason for this particular choice of name. There is no connection at all between what the silly women are doing and the very vital issue of racism which the name “Niggerbaiter” evokes. Think also of the repetitive frenzy on that delicious delicacy called “spam” that fills up the eponymous sketch of wide renown. Chances are that the popularity of the Python “Spam” sketch led to the term being used for internet junk mail, but why did this particular dish merit their attention more than (say) shepherd’s pie? Yet the finest example of the willful category mistake with respect to art comes in the Art Gallery sketch which I will do no more than mention here.5 John Cleese and Graham Chapman enter an art gallery dressed as Janet and Marge, two middle-aged and lower middle class women. Their children (off-screen, and inexistent, of course) misbehave, little Ralph eventually nibbling a Turner just as Marge is relating to Janet how he used to spit at paintings: MARGE

Ralph used to spit—he could hit a Van Gogh at thirty yards. But he knows now it’s wrong—don’t you Ralph? (she looks down) Ralph! Stop it! Stop it! Stop chewing that Turner! You are ... (she disappears from shot) You are a naughty, naughty, vicious little boy. (smack; Janet also gives her boy a smack, Marge comes back into shot holding a copy of Turner’s Fighting Temeraire in a lovely gilt frame but all tattered) Oh, look at that! The Fighting Temeraire—ruined! What shall I do?

JANET

(taking control) Now don’t do a thing with it love, just put it in the bin over there.

MARGE

Really?

_____________ 4 5

Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest, Act II. See The Complete Illustrated Stories, Plays and Poems of Oscar Wilde. London: Chancellor Press, 1991. 520. For a more detailed treatment, see Ronald Shusterman, “Les Delvoye, Duchamp, et ‘autres’ Kapoor: pour une théorie agrammaticale de l’art.”

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JANET

Yes take my word for it, Marge. Kevin’s eaten most of the early nineteenth-century British landscape artists, and I’ve learned not to worry. As a matter of fact, I feel a bit peckish myself. (she breaks a bit off the Turner) Yes...

Marge also tastes a bit. MARGE

I never used to like Turner.

JANET

(swallowing) No ... I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like. (Monty Python 42-43)

Now you may laugh at this example—the Pythons hope you do—but you should also be aware that several contemporary artists have produced comestible artworks or explored the art of eating and the eating of art—I have already mentioned the Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri but there are others as well. Notice how Janet takes to its logical conclusion the Philistine argument I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like. If the ultimate reason in all artistic creation and evaluation is the sensory question of taste, then why not bite into the canvas for a clear and final judgment? If the painting tastes good, then it’s art, and what you like is reason enough. Can we count this Python sketch as an illustration of what I have called the significant mistake? I believe it does make us both experience and re-evaluate, indirectly and implicitly perhaps, our categories and concepts. But I haven’t yet shown how this kind of experience can be ethical. Perhaps the claim that such a sketch is also ethical or metaethical is indeed preposterous. 4. Literature, Cognition and Value The Shepherd and his son the Clown are, at the end of The Winter’s Tale, justly proud of their new status as “gentlemen-born,” even to the point of celebrating “the first gentleman-like tears that ever we shed.” To this the Shepherd adds the solemn hope: “We may live, son, to shed many more” and the son agrees: CLOWN

Ay; or else ‘twere hard luck, being in so preposterous estate as we are. (Act V, 2, 147-48)

The significant mistake in this example is indeed significant, as there is (at least in Shakespeare’s eyes) something preposterous in the prosperity of fools. Shakespeare’s intentional use of what is an unintentional pun (in the mouth of his character) ties in well with one of the most common if not the most convincing theories of humor—the so-called superiority theory. Here laughing is always “laughing-at”—where our good humor derives

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from our sense of superiority with respect to a speaker who confuses preposterous with prosperous.6 But this good cheer depends on recognition; we can only feel superior and indeed laugh if we do recognize the mistake, and recognize (one might add, with a wink and a nod to the linguistic philosophy of Austin, Grice, and Searle) that Shakespeare knows that we know that he knows that we know that preposterous is indeed an artistic pun and not a misprint. It is in this shared and reciprocal effort of textual and indeed mutual comprehension that the metaethical effect of the agrammaticality or significant mistake is to be found. And I would add, in the spirit of the power of absence, that the effect is more powerful when it remains implicit. I shall take as a counter-example a few excerpts from First Light (1989) by Peter Ackroyd. Floey Hanover, a minor character, is given to her own preposterous linguistic confusions. Upon looking at a fossil, she exclaims to her husband Joey: “It’s one of them Mammonites.” And the text continues: “‘Is that the right word? Mammonite?’ Joey was accustomed to his wife’s little mistakes with language” (Ackroyd 73). Here we have, just two pages after the introduction of the characters, a clear indication from a reliable narrator on how to read the scene. True, in this case, the narrator doesn’t give us the correct word—ammonites—but we are given a rule for our reading. And, of course, the rule is confirmed, such as when Floey confuses kikes with dykes (122) or says, to an acquaintance, about her husband, a retired music-hall artist, “At heart, you know, he’s still an old lesbian.” To this, unsurprisingly, Joey responds, “I think… that you mean thespian” (177)—explicitly correcting his wife’s mistake. Now the logic of my position does push me to argue that the greatest metaethical effect, the greatest movement towards reciprocal solidarity, in short, the most powerful presence of ethics in culture, will come in those examples where I have to work to understand. For the obvious pun can slide by me unawares, whereas the difficult one, the truly significant mistake, involves me in an act of participation and discovery—participation in a culture and/or discovery of that aspect of my own culture or of a neighboring culture that I haven’t yet fathomed. This brings me to Floey’s mistake somewhat earlier on. When asked what she would like to drink, she asks for “gin and a bit.” “‘It. Gin and it.’ Joey corrected Floey automatically …” (170). The problem is that what is automatic for Joey was hardly so for me. Perhaps it’s because I’m not English, or perhaps it’s because I’m not much of a drinker, but I had no idea of what gin and it _____________ 6

On humor, see Simon Critchley, On Humour. For a politically tendentious presentation of the superiority theory, see F.H. Buckley, The Morality of Laughter.

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meant, that is, until I went online and Google, with its 31900 “hits” for gin and it, told me what kind of cocktail it indeed was. Now it is this kind of example that leads many people to see the reading experience as essentially cognitive. After all, thanks to Ackroyd, I know something new to order the next time I’m in a pub. But is it really thanks to Ackroyd, or thanks to Google? Ackroyd has given me a new element of vocabulary—but I’ve confirmed it via (more or less) reliable external authorities. It would be foolish to deny that we derive information from literary sources—for literature is, after all, composed in the language of information, as Wittgenstein would say. But is it really the prime function of literature to provide such information? If fiction has something to teach us, how exactly do we learn from it? Suppose I pick up the following text: […] his hand opened; he held up to the light something that flashed, that winked, that was a most lovely green. “It’s a nemeral,” said Pip solemnly. “Is it really, Pip?’” Even Isabel was impressed. […] Aunt Beryl had a nemeral in a ring, but it was a very small one. (Mansfield 14)

I didn’t Google the term nemeral, nor did I look it up in my Shorter Oxford, because I realized after a few seconds of confusion that this was a veritable gem of candid childhood narration, the kind of narration that Katherine Mansfield turned into an art. My point is that we cannot learn directly and exclusively from literature, for we can only “learn” what we know already or what we confirm elsewhere. For if we knew nothing else, we wouldn’t be able to figure out that what the boy (and even the narrator) is calling a “nemeral” is in fact an emerald.7 But if such an example cannot count as cognition in the full sense, it does produce the metaethical effect I have in mind. For this kind of mistake leads to an awareness, both of the necessity of interpretation and of our common and reciprocal participation in this form of life. 5. “What Happened to Me on My Holiday” In examining the metaethical effect of incorrect language, I do not mean to encourage any automatic extrapolation towards the claim that the representation of alternate or “deviant” behavior also has its own intrinsic metaethical effect. There may or may not be a connection here, but I am wary of all attempts to generalize or to formulate recipes for artistic and moral success. So as I labor to underline a metaethical force in intentionally erroneous language, I hope that this will not be seen as a total en_____________ 7

Note also that my spell checker changed “nemeral” into “numeral” when I wasn’t looking.

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dorsement of this more general view that the essential purpose of all art is to be morally disturbing. On the contrary, I am trying to defend the pluralist claim that ethics and culture interact in diverse and unpredictable ways. It is true, however, that our society, like language itself, thrives on regularities and needs its array of strict rules. My spell-checker, as we have seen, can be horribly narrow-minded. For a lark, I once fed into it a version of Finnegans Wake that I had downloaded from the web. The harddrive churned for a few moments before blurting out the following protest: “There are too many errors in this document” and it stopped displaying them. Before this final complaint, the screen looked something like this:

Perhaps it is incorrect to use this as an example of “incorrect” language; perhaps it would be better to submit the text to a Joycean PC, to an ideal spell-checker with an ideal insomnia, ready to spend its entire virtual lifetime learning to speak Joyce’s tongue. The errors here are a call to unlimited (one might say impossible) interpretation—and as such they are a reminder of non-determinism in itself. My final example is the final piece in Amis’s collection entitled Heavy Water and Other Stories. “What Happened to Me on My Holiday” (1997) is a strange text, dedicated to a certain “Elias Fawcett, 1978-1996,” written in an unwieldy phonetic transliteration whose purpose and exact nature is, at first, difficult to grasp. The story begins like this: A derrible thing habbened do me on my haliday. A harrible thing, and a bermanend thing. Id won’d be the zame, ever again. (199)

After a few moments, however, even the unwitting reader (that is a charitable description of myself) gets the impression that this is going to be an at least partially factual account, hidden for some reason in this strange language, of a real death in Amis’s entourage. Even someone who knows only a little about Amis can recognize this as one of his world-upside-

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down-or-backwards strategies—manipulating time and narrative in order to produce some special effect. Here the incorrect language proves rather touching, because we do sense that it is a sign of pain, ostensibly the sign of something painful from Amis’s own personal life. So the reader seeks an explanation for this cover-up, and, indeed, a tiny bit of research reveals that Elias Fawcett was the son of Amis’s first wife. He died at the age of seventeen. The story, as the specialists point out,8 is narrated by Elias’s step-brother, in other words, by Amis’s own son Louis, or rather by a fictional version of him. In any case, this narrator doesn’t leave us completely in the dark for long. The text continues as follows: Bud virzd I’d better say: don’d banig! I’m nad zuvvering vram brain damage—or vram adenoids. And I gan wride bedder than thiz when I wand do. But I don’d wand do. Nad vor now. (199)

He goes on to confess that he tells the story thiz way—in zargazdig Ameriganese—begaz I don’d wand id do be glear … There is thiz zdrange resizdanze. There is thiz zdrange resizdanze. (199-200)

Now even after a few pages and a bit more exposure, the deciphering of this text remains a rather fastidious experience for the reader. Though we rapidly grasp the purpose of the device, the actual exercise never becomes automatic, and even towards the end of the text, when we should theoretically be thoroughly trained, there are moments when we have to stop and struggle. The story ends with the following transition back to normal English: The Haliday has gum and gan. The haliday is over. The holiday has come and gone. The holiday is over. Goodbye to it all. And that is what happened to me on my holiday. (208)

The movement back to standard English reminds us that the mistakes are voluntary, and this, too, is a call for interpretation rather than just identification. It is a rather obvious paradox that such intentional transgressions lead to the formulation of new rules, and that this dialectic yields its own renewed solidarity. This is why such intentional incorrectness has a more powerful effect than simple standardization—it involves an effort towards harmony rather than mere obedience. And here we might indeed say that it is when language goes on holiday that we learn the most, if only we keep in mind that learning means forging together in the smithies of our interrelated souls the continuously re-created conscience of our race. _____________ 8

See, for example, the review by James Diedrick at www.richmondreview.co.uk/books/ heavywat.html (13 Nov. 2007).

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6. Interpretation and Free Will A number of pages of Culture and Value are devoted to religion, and notably to the question of predestination and free will.9 I think that the presence of such remarks, in a series of notes that also ramble on about literature and music, is no mere accident. In many places, Wittgenstein seems to be saying that ethics couldn’t exist, that culture couldn’t exist, without the concept of free will. Teaching predestination, he writes, […] could not constitute an ethical upbringing. If you wanted to bring someone up ethically while yet teaching him such a doctrine, you would have to teach it to him after having educated him ethically, representing it as a sort of incomprehensible mystery. (81e)

Ethics doesn’t make sense—the concept has no application—if man is entirely pre-determined; predestination is a doctrine that can only lead to the “despair or incredulity” (81e) of the rational agent. And yet, because of our ingrained notion of causality, free will itself is a problem, a paradox, as Isaac Bashevis Singer once slyly pointed out in a public lecture. When asked by a student in the audience if he believed in free will, he replied, “Of course I do! I have no choice!”10 It is this fact—that free will is indeed a problem—that literature and indeed all art helps us to grasp. All art, all literature teaches us the power and paradox of free will. This is what I mean when I say that the work of art is a metaethical experience of the form of judgment and value. All art involves and crystallizes this experience of choice, sometimes in a directly ethical way when such concrete values are indeed present, as in the realist novel. But also, inevitably, and in all cases, in a metaethical way, since in all cases we are being asked to interpret and thus in all cases we are being made both to exercise and to experience our problematic freedom of choice. What is interpretation, if not the exercise and the experience of free will, a free will that is paradoxically constrained by an external object and an intersubjective context? What is interpretation, if not the consciousness of our common participation in a form of life that brings ethics into culture, that gives sense to a world that has in itself no value? It is perhaps at this metaethical level, during this conscious experience of the nature of judgment and choice, that ethics and esthetics are one.

_____________ 9 10

See, for example, Culture and Value 80-81 e. There are various versions of this anecdote, with slight modifications of the text.

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References Ackroyd, Peter. First Light. 1989. London: Abacus, 1990. Amis, Martin. Heavy Water and Other Stories. 1998. New York: Vintage, 2000. Buckley, F.H. The Morality of Laughter. 2003. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2005. Critchley, Simon. On Humour .London: Routledge, 2002. Diamond, Cora. “Introduction to ‘Having a Rough Story About What Moral Philosophy Is.’” The Literary Wittgenstein. Eds. John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer. London: Routledge, 2004. 127-132. Gibson, John. “Reading for Life.” The Literary Wittgenstein. Eds. John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer. London: Routledge, 2004. 109124. Gibson, John, and Wolfgang Huemer, eds. The Literary Wittgenstein. London: Routledge, 2004. Lafargue, Bernard. “Les Retrouvailles de l’esthétique.” Figures de l’art 10 (2006): 13-16. Mansfield, Katherine. “At the Bay”. 1922. The Garden Party and Other Stories. Ed. Lorna Sage. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997. Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1949. Schalkwyk, David. “Wittgenstein’s ‘Imperfect Garden’: The Ladders and Labyrinths of Philosophy as Dichtung.” The Literary Wittgenstein. Eds. John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer. London: Routledge, 2004. 55-74. Shusterman, Ronald. “Les Delvoye, Duchamp, et ‘autres’ Kapoor: pour une théorie agrammaticale de l’art.” Figures de l’art 10 (2006): 201217. Von Wright, G.H. Wittgenstein. Oxford: Blackwell, 1982. Wilde, Oscar. The Complete Illustrated Stories, Plays and Poems of Oscar Wilde. London: Chancellor Press, 1991. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Culture and Value. Trans. P. Winch. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984 —: Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1976. —: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. C.K. Ogden. London: Routledge, 1996.

PHILIPP WOLF (GIESSEN)

Beyond Virtue and Duty: Literary Ethics as Answerability1 The cognitive and operative gap between autonomy and heteronomy, selfdetermination and being determined, is and ought, remains the crucial problem of both virtue and duty ethics. Traditional moral philosophy takes “Good’ and ‘Eudemonia,” “Reason” and “Freedom” for granted, presupposing that everybody falls in with and follows these concepts.2 Of course, the moral subject must be capable of abstracting from him- or herself (his or her desires). At the same time teleological as well as deontological ethics cannot help relying on normative virtues, imperatives and maxims to tell us, someone else, what to do and how to behave: “Thou Shall,” “Act in Way …,” “Do Good and aspire to the Highest Good.”3 Yet if I follow rules and values set up by someone else, it is not really myself who acts ethically, but the other who acts morally through me. If I am not thoroughly convinced by the Aristotelian telos, and, as a modern and functional individual, unable or unwilling to practice “Good,” the Aristotelian or Christian maxim will never be internalized and I will continue to live heteronymously. And if she has not “always already” accepted the inner “urge” or “determination” of Kant’s “moral rule” as a “fact of reason,”4 she cannot be counted a true ethical or moral agent. An Aristotelian or Kantian only acts in a truly ethical, authentic and credible way if he or she does not act on behalf of Aristotle or Kant but, as a matter of course, by herself.5 The hiatus between autonomy and heteronomy comes to the fore in self-reflexive (post-)modern culture and is also the fundamental problem of much of contemporary criticism. Someone else—a critic—presupposes a certain ethical stance when reading a text. The modern reader, however, _____________ 1 2 3 4 5

A shorter version of this essay has previously appeared in the journal Anglistik 17.1 (2006) under the title “Ethics of Literature: A Reconsideration with Three Suggestions” (151-166). The central works I am referring to are, of course: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics and Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft. Aristotle and Kant have both drawn up elaborate virtue tables. The moral rule as fact of reason is both to acknowledge and to substantiate the concept of freedom (to decide otherwise) and the concept of humanity as an end in itself or of human beings as ends in themselves. To push the point even further: One must have always been a Kantian or Aristotelian to be a moral person; but if I am only insofar a moral person as I am a Kantian or Aristotelian, I am not really a moral person.

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feels not at all obliged to read it in that or any other ethical way. She, first of all, reads it her way. The following essay—tentatively6—attempts at dealing with this problem. 1. Current Literary Ethics and Its Circularity All major contributions to literary ethics revolve around what I call emotive exemplum theory. Literature offers through its rhetoric an individual experience, which appeals to me imaginatively and emotionally. And I can project and feel myself into it. This experience is at the same time exemplary and potentially common to all of us or at least to a great number of readers. The result is that we will personally see and feel which acts are good or bad for us, ultimately leading to a mending of our ways. We empathize with Dickens’s Pip Pirrip (from Great Expectations), Hardy’s Tess, and, of course, with Shakespeare’s Ophelia. And since we subsequently also feel, in a way, abused and mistreated, our sense of justice is sharply aroused: neither I nor my fellow human being, should ever be treated like that.7 But the emotive exemplum approach must face at least two fundamental methodical problems. In modernity, novels, plays and even more so poems are not consumed for reasons of moral self-edification or the betterment of our post-capitalist society. They are read or staged because they are interesting and entertaining. Occasionally we even enjoy the evil in literature, or subjective and morally unbound states of aesthetic solipsism. In Shakespeare’s play, Richard the Third is by far a more interesting character than his rather dull brothers. One only has to watch the film version with Ian McKellen to understand that the play’s enormous success is due to the charisma, or what Keats called the “gusto” precisely of its immoral character if not his very immorality itself. And some theological subtext and psychological explanation notwithstanding (as in the famous monologue which opens the play), Shakespeare evidently intended this effect: “Chop off his head.” Full Stop. Thus Richard’s quick and stunning answer to Buckingham’s question: “Now my lord, what shall we do if we perceive/ Lord Hastings will not yield to our complots?”8 Iago or Edmund (King Lear) are similarly intriguing figures. And if we look at romantic, post-romantic or modernist poems, many of them seem to cele_____________ 6 7 8

A more comprehensive study of this question with alternative suggestion will appear in book form in 2008. Good cases in point are Cunningham, The Heart of What Matters: The Role for Literature in Moral Philosophy 5, and similarly, Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity XVI. William Shakespeare, King Richard III III, 1, 191-93.

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brate pure aesthetic or psychological states of being precisely beyond good and evil. Nietzsche’s influential aesthetic “will to power” does not restrain itself when it comes to violence. Moral theory and ethics, in other words, follow two incompatible functional codes: what is interesting, emotionally engaging or intellectually appealing, need not necessarily be conducive to our behavior towards other people. The problem with most content-oriented criticism is a certain Aristotelian automatism (or teleology) along with a positive anthropology which predominantly American philosophers and literary critics, such as Martha Nussbaum, Wayne C. Booth, John Gardner, Marshall Gregory or (arguably) Richard Rorty, seem to take for granted. One privileges an ontologically-given and indiscriminate “good” and assumes that everyone naturally strives or should strive for it. The anthropological strain from Hobbes to de Sade, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Feuerbach and Marx, Freud and Adorno is left out, however. In her Poetic Justice, Nussbaum, for example, juxtaposes an objective or factual viewpoint and subjective fancy, the metaphorical ability of seeing one thing in another (see Nussbaum 36). The latter faculty, as Nussbaum observes in her reading of Dickens’s Hard Times, presents “the great charity in the heart” and “nourishes a general construal of the world” (38). For the sake of the civilization process a good moral fancy has to triumph in public narratives over bad fantasies. Yet this does not at all mean that we do not cherish or indulge in evil or destructive ones.9 There is after all a strong tradition of “Black Romanticism” (see, e.g., Poe’s “The Black Cat”). Wayne Booth tries to formulate an extensive and inclusive notion of virtue (see Booth 10-12),10 but the ethical effect he expects from literature is based on a humanist concept of literary communication and reception which might not be shared by everyone. His over-ruling metaphor for the assumed relation between implied author, author and readers is “friendship” or “the company we keep,” which I think is rather an idealistic presupposition. We may very well receive certain emotional impressions from a text and we may also engage in secondary observations or evaluations of these emotions, but it does not necessarily imply a kind of ethical discourse and clarification with the implied author-friend, not to mention a symmetrical or recursive ethical exchange. It is first of all me, the reader, who allows for a fusion of textual and personal horizon and a modification of his or her own attitudes. The implied author may very _____________ 9 10

For evil as a prolific aesthetic principle see Bohrer, “Das Böse” 459-73. It is some time since Booth’s and Nussbaum’s seminal studies have appeared. But as they still form the central reference of the ongoing discourse on ethical criticism, it will primarily focus on some of their arguments. For a concise overview, see Antor, “Ethical Criticism” 163-165.

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well remain dumb and the reader quite happy with an indistinct feeling of viciousness. Apart from a quite unethical fascination with morally unbound acts, the very materiality of the text, the sound and rhythm, the intensity or strangeness of the imagery may utterly divert me from engaging in any further communication with this text. Rather than in the story I may only take delight in the discours and pure descriptions, appreciating the observational sensibility of this passage (perhaps a very different kind of aesthetic ethics). My fascination may make me talk to my wife or a colleague about this text or it might put me off to a degree that I want to forego any further interpretation. It may strike me dumb because I find its sublimity beyond words. There is a related logical problem owing to the different epistemological status of the two discourses. Nearly all ethical criticism hinges on the reader’s imaginative and emotional identification with a particular fictional person in a specific situation. He or she must be sure that his or her experience is an authentic one, since a kind of correspondence takes place between what we gather from the pages, our imaginative realization of it and our immediate feelings. These we then recognize as our own. One can be even surer of the truthfulness of this experience because the literary representation has come about as a free and relatively spontaneous metaphorical selection and combination by an author who thereby manages to match representation and the represented object, or the world outside and our inside. What we may get is an hour of true sentiment, “eine Stunde der wahren Empfindung,” as proffered, for example, by the German aestheticist writer Peter Handke. But a true experience like our empathy with the dying Juliet need not necessarily lead to an ethically relevant insight and to changes in our behavior. Our empathy with the “forlorn” and haunted Ancient Mariner of Coleridge’s wonderful ballad will not automatically transform us into ecological activists for the protection of birds, particularly the albatross. If I want to gain ethical knowledge I must switch the categorical registers and draw on a philosophical discipline, based on general concepts such as responsibility, freedom, human rights or animal rights. I will have to abandon my rather speechless and particular emotional identity, which concurs with a unique imaginative or narrative imagination, and resort to abstract schemes and terms. If it is the specific narrative case and lyrical image that presupposes and determines the success of literary ethics, how can literature be usefully employed if we have to leave this experience behind when turning to the codes of ethics. I am either in the field of literature, or I am outside in the field of philosophical discourse. The very specific emotive and metaphorical effect which is located in the first field is supposed to transform me into a better human being. Yet this effect is

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necessarily cancelled out when I cross into the second field of conceptual discourse. Aesthetic emotional intensity (which may be incompatible with everyday emotions) is to trigger off ethically relevant attitudes. Yet as soon as it is employed for ethical purposes (naturally situated in our daily and historical life-world), the initial intensity fades out, is diluted.11 Thus the ethical purpose may precisely lose what was thought to constitute its motivational momentum, namely the very force of the aesthetic emotions it wants to draw on. Here the above-mentioned hiatus between autonomy and heteronomy turns up likewise. The methodical problems raised by ethical criticism come down to the age-old problem of the incompatibility of the first-order and subjective “qualia”-view from within and the analytical second-order view from outside. Emotions such as pity, fear, disgust, involve, to be sure, some cognitive significance as they make us adopt evaluative stances in the first instance. They at once draw our attention to the value significance of an object, act, event or opinion. Pity in itself implies some belief and a judgment and hence, according to Nussbaum “ethical information” (Nussbaum 65). But does this information also discriminate between appropriate or inappropriate, plausible or implausible? Kant, as it is well known, does not accept emotions as a basis for ethical acts. Pity doesn’t distinguish between “higher obligation and blind enchantment” (Kant, Kants Werke 214). Even though pity is benevolently and intentionally directed towards the Other, it is not directed in a categorical way. The emotion of pity that I bring to bear on, say, a starved dog may have the same or a “somehow” stronger “raw feel” than the one that I experience when hearing about thousands of drowned people in the Indian Ocean.12 Emotions prove rather unreliable in terms of ethical significance and may cognitively supply us with completely inadequate prejudices. What we need, then, is a discriminating second perspective, which can link us with generally comprehensible judgments. Drawing on Adam Smith, Nussbaum offers a “judicious spectator,” who must be distinguished from the more immediately involved reader. The “judicious spectator,” who is compatible with Booth’s “friend,” qualifies, corrects the more naïve first-order reader in the reading process (Nussbaum 72-78). For Nussbaum this secondary instance seems to emerge simply from the fact that texts consist of “formal structures” (76). Our identificational reading experience is also mediated and thus at the same time no immediate experience. Unfortunately, Nussbaum remains rather vague as to what, or who could make us take up _____________ 11 12

For an aesthetics of (ethical) negativity, see Bohrer, “Die Negativität des Poetischen” 1-14. There is a retired woman who spends her time and lots of money collecting stray dogs from the streets of Bucharest to take them to German animal shelters, while she hardly notices the suffering of the many homeless children with AIDS in the same streets.

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a secondary and ethically discriminating view. What is it that could startle us? What kind of (unwieldy) linguistic structure and objective correlate may achieve this effect, and in which way may we retain as much as possible of the original intensity? We will return to these questions further down. Nussbaum starts off her ethical analysis of fancy in Hard Times with a detailed account of advanced forms of utilitarian economics, “utilitarian rational-choice models.” In fact, throughout the entire chapter she confronts the uni-dimensional analysis of this approach (impersonated by Gradgrind and Bitzer) with the multidimensional world of the novel (Nussbaum 13-52). Economic accounts of human deliberations she finds rather simplistic, while novels offer a complex sense “of the valuational abilities that make us fully human” (47). This—from a literary point of view—is true and hardly astonishing. But if she wants to achieve more than that, namely a corresponding ethical effect, a related refinement of human and humane valuational abilities, and eventually “the improvement of human life” as well as the “practise of citizenship,” (52) she has to assume the same preliminary distinctions for the reader. The reader must have her concept of Aristotelian ethics and her concept of fancy already in mind, one must be anti-utilitarian while the homo economicus has to drop the functional, rational and necessarily quantitative code (to have or have not) of his discipline. The more educated reader might well see in Gradgrind the caricature of a Utilitarian. But judging, for example, from her introductory quote to Chapter 2, Bitzer’s matter-of-fact biological definition of a horse (13), one might just as well recognize a good scientific positivist in Gradgrind and Bitzer. Ethical criticism seems susceptible to circular reasoning, confusing the “ought” with the “is.” Scanning a recent anthology of ethical criticism, one frequently hits upon an argument as presented, for example, by Marshall Gregory. “Moral categories,” he argues, are not “contingent” but “integral” to “real life,” “most fictions represent real life,” “we cannot endure to read fictions without bringing [moral] standards into play here as well” (Gregory 41). Whenever we meet new people—both in social life and in literature—we will ask ourselves, according to Gregory, ‘“is this person good?”’13 The overall assumption, then, is that we are essentially predisposed to act and react in a moral way, we are in principle morally good beings. The others are to a lesser degree morally good or immoral beings. And since all good literature is morally good literature, we only _____________ 13

All pictures we draw of other people “are portraits drawn almost entirely in ethical and moral colors” (Gregory 42).

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have to read more to grow into morally better people. (It is indicative that the terms moral and ethical are used synonymously.) Yet Gregory’s argument, as so much other traditional normative ethical criticism, fails to convince since it is begging the question. One selfevidently assumes in one’s premises what one comes up with in one’s conclusions. The fact, after all, is that moral norms and ethical behavior are only possible, rather than necessary, options in modern Western culture. Morality has indeed become “contingent” in our self-reflexive modernity. There is, on the one hand, psychology (or, more recently, neurology) and the legalistic institutionalization of our behavior, which today is owing to conditions and circumstances (or deterministic neurons). The age of post-conventional morality is characterized by an individualization as well as particularization of values, while the ethical code comes down to respect or disrespect.14 Modern constitutional thinking has separated— with good reason—the sphere of law from the sphere of morality. As far as literary and ethical studies are concerned, we cannot therefore, unlike Wayne Booth, rely on anyone to read a text with an ethical intention or even “request.” Only ethical critics may be reliably expected to engage in a literary text with the purpose of making ethical claims or even employing moral precepts. Literary texts, vice versa, may very well imply attitudes and propositions deemed (un-)ethical or (im-)moral according to given standards, but they do not as a matter of course ask us to make value judgments in order to clarify and assert our own moral standards. People more often read precisely because texts offer spaces of freedom in which I can remain in a state of suspension. Most fiction may “represent real life,” but it is the very nature of fiction that it simultaneously allows for a distance from “real life” (whatever that is). Out of this detachment (which also promises a relief and even escape from the strain of daily pressure), we are more likely to develop what may be called a narrative curiosity. We wonder about motives for and reactions to actions, about socio-cultural conditions and problem-solving strategies. Especially in contemporary novels from J.M. Coetzee to Don DeLillo and John Banville we ask ourselves “how do people cope with suffering,” yet our interest still remains free from value judgments. In Siri Hustvedt’s bestselling novel about loss and betrayal, What I Loved, the adolescent habitual liar and thief Mark signs a moral contract in front of his fatherly friend (and narrator) Leo Hertzberg, his (doomed) father Bill and stepmother Violet. The document is supposed to draw him “into an understanding that morality is finally a social contract, a consensus about basic human laws” (What I Loved 247). But “the commandments” remain irrelevant and without consequence both _____________ 14

See Luhmann 358-447.

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for the persons in the novel and the (implied) reader, they are not mentioned again. The lying, stealing and breaches of trust continue through some two hundred pages and the (nonetheless) charming boy incurs a good deal of resentment on both Leo’s and the reader’s part. Through the influence of the hedonistic and cynical artist Giles, Mark’s “moral waywardness” comes to the point of accessory (or perhaps even participation) in a murder. Yet we are neither morally disturbed about the amorality of the New York art set in the nineties nor do we find Mark’s inconsiderateness revolting. We notice his socially careless and (self-)destructive acts, but no reader will be prompted into an ethical outcry and an investigation about lying in general and his own disposition towards truth in particular. No one, I guess, will pick up Kant’s Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (in which lying is generally disapproved of) or Nietzsche’s On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense (for a very different, relativistic perspective) to reflect upon the pertinence of Mark’s contract in our post-capitalist society. (Since there are, on the one hand, serious promises at stake and, on the other, a possible intensification of one’s life, either work might be theoretically pertinent.) We rather read on since we want to know why someone shows this kind of deviant—and for this very fact interesting— behavior, because we are curious how Leo (the narrator) and Violet will cope with it and whether Mark will end up in prison or on the street. And it is the ongoing and gripping narrative that provides us with the more or less satisfactory answer. He was debauched by the totally commercialized, sensation-seeking and drug-saturated New York art scene of the 1990s. And it was the divorce of his parents; his double-bind existence (and journeying) between his stepmother and his (cold) natural mother that had caused a kind of split identity in his personality: “‘He had to demonstrate his falseness for years,’” Violet concludes (What I Loved 373). His psychotherapist had already diagnosed his “problems” (not his “moral failure”) as “characterological” (245). Whether we find this satisfactory or not, the reader has all the while neither morally condemned Mark’s behavior, nor has she tried to excuse his lying with white lies, she simply does not bother about moral judgments. Both modern narrative and its readers are no longer concerned about ultimate justifications (what the German philosopher Karl-Otto Apel has called “Letztbegründung”) and circular reasoning. The reading process keeps us interested if it provides us with communicative openness, unexpected gaps, indeterminateness and “chocs” (W. Benjamin), new ways of seeing the subject and objects of our life-world, perhaps contemplation and, on the strength of its very openness, answerability without prejudice.

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A related basic problem with normative claims without a particular institutional frame is, of course, also the addressee: Whom do I want to reach, whom can I reach and who wants to be reached? Which rationallyinstrumental Wall Street economist can be convinced to read Hard Times for the sake of her humane improvement? I guess recommending literature and even a particular canon of works (as Nussbaum does) as an ethically salutary experience is merely preaching to the converted. 2. A Weak and Non-Circular Form of Literary Ethics The consequence, then, of all these methodological and aesthetic considerations could be to drop the whole enterprise of literary ethics. Since there is no automatic or at least necessary causal relationship between literary experience per se on the one, and ethical knowledge and a better life on the other hand, literary criticism and ethics as practical and philosophical disciplines appear to be better off without it. However, we cannot leave it at that. Literature would be as insignificant and inconsequential as any form of entertainment from pop songs to boxing. Reading literature exclusively for its complexity, semantic wealth or mimetic function turns either into a solely academic or a redundant and superfluous occupation. In fact, even chess, boxing or soccer are “made-up” activities that are not only highly complex and in some sense mimetic,15 they invite identification and are also permeated by, and built upon, rigorous moral standards. There are both primary values (such as mutual acknowledgment, respect) and secondary ones (such as courage, stamina, willpower etc.). If, in contrast, literature as a linguistic medium were not particularly conducive to forms of knowledge which can help us with our orientation in our life-world, we would simply have to stop teaching it in schools or universities. (Chess after all, highly complex as it may be, is not taught in schools either.) We would have to deny literature a didactic function. Yet there is a clear desire for values or a sense of orientation in an ever more complex globalized world, not least among the present generation of students. And I suppose it is most decisively within the communicative framework of educational institutions that an ethics of literature can be brought to bear. Whereas Booth has to assume rather an uncertain third communicative agent, English teachers who offer a course on pertinent texts by Margaret Atwood or on Macbeth simply do their job by also raising ethical questions. _____________ 15

See Oates.

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I think we can still comply with the demand for orientation if we acknowledge that literature allows for practically relevant forms of knowledge that are exclusively literary as opposed to forms only available through previously established rules and premises (such as in traditional moral theory or the ethos of boxing or soccer), or methods of falsification and verification (as in science). Not unlike circular literary ethics based on virtue or duty, those extra-literary discursive practices confine and direct recipients and agents to only a limited number of possibilities, actions, reactions and (the boxing audience) to rather a passive attitude and responsiveness. How then can we save ethics for literary criticism and, vice versa, how can we justify ethical criticism? First of all I think one cannot do entirely without specific assumptions, even though we may once again risk a petitio principii. In order to feel involved, imaginative constructs and literary emotions are still necessary preconditions, although not sufficient for an ethics of literature. It is also true that one has to presuppose a prior sense of justice, and an appropriate and responsible idea of social behavior. Once again we may be unable entirely to evade the vicious circle outlined above. But I do not see how, even in school, a socially depraved and desperate criminal could be morally edified by literature. Hedonistic aesthetes, cynical rationalists, legal positivists, the pathologically callous and the utterly indifferent—all those who do not want to be addressed (and who do not read)—may not be reached (which is a commonplace, yet sometimes forgotten among ethical critics). But, on the other hand, at least in our culture the more sophisticated reader has gone through Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development, at the end of which the adolescent will intuitively distinguish between right or wrong if the situation (as when the freedom and integrity of another person is in question) requires such a decision. Anyone who enters a narrative or a lyrical context in which suffering is expressed will also inevitably try to give reasons. From a reasonable (and habitualized) point of view we are not prepared to accept evil as an end in itself and thus try to explain Richard’s behavior with his deformity and Iago’s acts with his failed career.16 One will naturally ask for the appropriateness of a character’s or speaker’s motives, actions or poetic enunciation. In doing so one also takes a stance, based on the difference of what is and what ought or ought not to be. This always has an ethical dimension, since all actions in or outside the literary field take place within a wider social context. This is true for Robinson Crusoe, Huckleberry Finn, and even or even more so for an idiosyncratic and speechless person such as J. M. Coetzee’s Michael _____________ 16

Here traditional ethics has, of course, a point. Acting benevolently proves more reasonable in practical terms, i.e., our life-world, than acting malevolently.

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K. Appropriateness is, to be sure, a literary category, since the entertainment value of literary works depends not least on codes such as appropriate/not appropriate, plausible/implausible, right or wrong. Texts must make sense to me, and responsible actions make more sense to me than irresponsible actions. The reader who enters a literary text17 may well come across unreliable or ‘lying’ narrators and characters with all kinds of persuasive strategies. But she will also find herself in a communicative situation coming close to Jürgen Habermas’s ideal discourse.18 My willingness to participate is hardly conceivable without an intention to understand and a will to rightness. Since truth and power are irrelevant for me in fictional circumstances I am prepared to enter into a communicative exchange which in itself is non-violent and open to all kinds of subjects, attitudes, claims and arguments. Yet my desire to understand presupposes a readiness not only to be impartial but also to put myself or imagine myself into all other participants of the (narrative, poetic) speech situation. Familiar as this may sound to ethical critics, coherent reasoning does, however, not suffice to evade the categorical difficulties outlined above. It is not yet clear why we should need literature more than other pragmatic communicative situations dealing with what is or what ought to be. The propensity to give reasons and to assess is still too vague to explain the particular role literature can play. One can imagine many trivial situations in the courtroom, schoolyard or any neighborhood community where the same kind of reasoning might take place. In fact, literary appropriateness and plausibility which easily correspond with my ethically reasonable expectations may even be counter-productive. They remain without consequences. The solution to this can only be a methodical and systematic restriction of literary ethics. An ethical discourse should be applied to literature only if literature can serve its ethical purposes and pragmatic expectations more successfully than other discourses. It will be necessary to focus on literary as well as extra-literary (institutional) situations which are not only likely to nevertheless produce an ethical effect, but which may even require an ethical reaction or normative dialogue. Those situations have to be, on the one hand, semantically open, and, on the other, emotionally extraordinarily intense, even exasperating. In fact the emotional intensity must necessitate a semantic intensity, which should linger on. What is meant here is, of course, not total openness—convincingly repudiated by Booth (Booth 60-70)—but a phenomenological and aesthetic concreteness of linguistic forms and descriptions as well as characters, acts or deci_____________ 17 18

By literature I here mean texts that are not predominantly written to please by fulfilling the stereotypical expectations a certain reading public may cherish. See Habermas esp. 99.

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sions that appear (at least initially) normatively unbound and incomprehensible. Acts and language must be different and concrete (like the “face” of the Other) and they must challenge the reader to ask questions, to engage in a dialogue.19 This, however, also implies a restricted number of literary works. The novels of Dickens (as in Nussbaum’s example) or of Siri Hustvedt contain, to be sure, crucial moral phenomena, but these are predictable and so self-evidently aligned with modes of conventional understanding and explanation that no one, as argued above, is really bothered. In fact, coherence of ethical justification and reasoning is indispensable in courtrooms and schoolyards. Judges, teachers, parents must maintain a certain continuity for the sake of their credibility. Literature, however, is free to forego conventional balance and to disrupt our ethical complacency. Only rupture, another perspective (as, for example, Truman Capote’s vista of the murderers in In Cold Blood) or the recent discussion whether one must attribute (Kant’s) dignity to any sensible and/or conscious and/or sensitive subject whosoever, will not only arouse our interest but also trigger off a development in ethical thinking. It is not we who approach the text ethically and ask questions, it must be the other way round. The text must provoke ethical consternation in readers with neither a preconceived idea of “Good” nor of virtue. This is the only way to evade at least in part the petitio principii of traditional literary ethics. In ethical-philosophical terms this can only mean a modest or normatively weak approach, rather than the traditionally strong or rigorous versions in the vein of Aristotle, Jeremy Bentham, or Kant. Whereas teleological ethics (which comes ultimately down to contingent empirical preferences) gets entangled in naturalistic fallacies, deontological ethics aims at closure. Its purpose is a definite and consistent justification of a certain normative behavior in various situations. Literature, however, by virtue of its very open, indeterminate and reader-oriented structure, rules out context-free categorical imperatives and principled moral solutions of the “thou shall”type. In literary texts we may come across narrative and value discrepancies between what happens to a person and his or her given version of the event, or between author and narrator. The reader herself may occupy a different temporal and perhaps cultural perspective, which adds the possibility of a further evaluative position. In one and the same textual context _____________ 19

Heinz Antor, taking both poststructuralism and neopragmatism into account, bases his suggestions for an ethics of criticism on similar concepts. That is, “otherness” or “defamiliarization,” a subsequent engagement “in a process of negotiation and renegotiation,” as well as a sense of particularity embodied and furthered by the medium of literature itself (Antor, “The Ethics of Criticism in the Age After Value” 83). In what follows I would like to flesh out and carry on with this approach which acknowledges post-conventional morality or an “age after value.”

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we are presented with Henry the V’s justifying and highly persuasive war rhetoric as well as with the doubts and anxieties of his soldiers. At the same time we may have Michael Moore’s narrative documentary in mind which juxtaposes governmental voices and those of the morally and physically devastated soldiers, whose physical presence even on the mediating screen does ask for some reaction. And we may have also seen a modernized and violent 2003 National Theatre production of Henry V which, albeit still set in France, clearly refers to a present and ongoing war: “Once more into the jeeps.” (Henry, by the way, was represented by a daring black actor.)Various voices and strong and unresolved events come into conflict. This may be acted out for the time being, but those acts certainly require further interpretation and communication. Thus the strength of literary ethics consists precisely in its conceptual weakness and hermeneutic openness. Yet the semantic gap that opens up must also take on, dramatically spoken, the dimension of an abyss or chasm. There have been many attempts to conceptualize this consternation, such as event, pure presence, suddenness or silence. In recent theory, Lévinas’s “alterity” has been quite successfully combined with Bakhtin’s “answerability” (“otvetnost”). The textual rupture, in any case, must be strong enough to produce a response and for some cases, as we shall see, responsibility. A conceptually weak literary ethics of eventuality should take the suspicion into account deontological and universalizing ethical approaches from Kant to Habermas or Rawls have to cope with. Especially since the enlightenment, occidental ethics in the Greco-Christian tradition has always conceived of the Other in analogy to one’s Self, or, more precisely, my own reason. He or she becomes nothing else but an alter ego, another reasonable I. This is true for the commandment of brotherly love, as well as Kant’s Categorical Imperative with its many modern derivations. The advantage of these maxims is of course that they also include myself as a possible addressee or target of my acts. I am supposed to deal with a third person in such a way that we both can be happy with it. Yet this strain of ethics simply assumes that a seamless reciprocity, mutuality or symmetry between “I” and “Other” can be taken as a matter of fact—while the autonomous Self, which takes its law from itself alone, remains the starting point and agent for communicative and social action. “I” equals “I,” and you are to do what I am doing. Deontological and subject-centered ethics may continue to be a strong point of ethical reference when it comes to questions of human dignity, freedom or justice (or e.g., torture). Here rigorous and general obligation must cancel out any personal inclination whatsoever. Yet it turns out deficient when coping with competing claims in many concrete social situations. Literary ethics, which draws on the principal philosophical conviction of modern thinkers as diverse as

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Heidegger, Adorno, Lévinas, Alain Badiou or the German philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels, neither begins with the Ego as a moral self nor with Alter (in and with which I only act, after all, like Ego).20 Literary ethics begins with an asymmetrical situation, negating the supposedly troublefree communication between textual agents and reader. Following no preestablished rule, it eschews the occupation and appropriation of the content of its intention. Literary ethics, in contrast, starts off with what occurs to me, recognizes and acknowledges the “non-identical.”21 It gives itself to and lets itself be guided by the heteronomy, the phenomenological openness, undecidability and the individual and singular presence of things and persons which literary language and unexpected narrative events bring to pass. Bernhard Waldenfels’s concept of answerability, which relies more on Husserl than Lévinas,22 seems quite helpful. Abstract as his approach may be it may still serve as a starting point for an ethics beyond teleology and deontology. The radically strange, he asserts, is not altogether different from the accustomed, yet it cannot be deduced from it nor subsumed to the general. The heterological experience surmounts meaning “whereupon we understand something and ourselves” (intentionally) as well as rules “according to which we orientate ourselves, if we treat someone or something in this or that way” (the ‘regular circuit of communication’) (Waldenfels 57). Its claim23 interrupts “familiar formations of meaning and rule and sets new ones going. What I answer owes its meaning to the challenge by what or whereupon I answer” (58). The Other unfolds its performative significance in actu. It takes me by surprise just as I may be taken unawares in a sudden encounter with an old adversary in the streets whom I owe some explanation, which I have, however, not ready at hand. The contextual-situative claim “precedes any moral or legally established pretension, since the question whether the respective claim is justified or not presupposes that one has already heard previously about a claim. We move in a zone beyond Good and Evil, beyond Right and Wrong” (59). The claim addressing me corresponds with an answer which responds “to the offers and demands of the Other without merely filling gaps of knowledge or action. Rather than granting what it already possesses, such a response gives what it finds and discovers in answering” (60). The point, then, is that my (responsible) answerability originates in and depends on _____________ 20 21 22 23

See Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. For an application of Badiou to an ethics of art see the insightful article by Shusterman 215-227; here 225-6. Adorno’s term is “Erkenntnis des Nichtidentischen”; see Adorno 140. Lévinas’s ethics, his “altogether Other” is still conceived of in theological terms, one should note. Waldenfels uses the German noun “Anspruch” which can mean claim, right, demand as well as appeal.

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the phenomenon that transcends and transgresses my well-worn fixtures and fittings of normative rules. Waldenfels distinguishes four moments of a responsive logic which may well be related to literary phenomena. The first is singularity, denoting more than a part of a whole or a case subsumable to law. While evading the distinction between the particular and the general, it is not exclusively individual and unspeakable. “We are rather dealing with a singularity of events, which, by deviating from accustomed events, make another way of seeing, thinking and acting possible.” The most suitable genre in this respect should be provided by the novella (which, according to Goethe, is about an “event without precedent”). Good examples may be the short novels by Joseph Conrad, Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist or the short stories of Walter de La Mare. One also thinks of the unforgettable key-event of a hot-air balloon accident at the beginning of Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love. The second moment of responsive logic is characterized by its inevitability or “ne-cessitudo” (Waldenfels 63), a claim “which likewise does not fall under the disjunction of facts and norms, is and ought [‘Sein und Sollen’].” The claim of the Other—in its otherness—necessitates an answer. Even if one turns speechlessly away, one likewise responds. Michael Hamburger’s or Paul Celan’s Holocaust poems, Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow cannot help pro-vocare, they call us forward. The third moment occurs with an inevitable supplementarity (65). The textual incident, figure, absolute metaphor etc. is received and begins only post festum. Through the lapse of time we cannot retroactively interfere and undo the act; as in a traumatic experience it recurs with reverberations and supplements. Celan’s “Black milk of the night” is twice belated and keeps us irrevocably and endlessly in its grip. Macbeth’s murder, ambivalent as it is, the shot girl at the end of Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, linger on in our long-term memory. The images of many of J.M. Coetzee’s characters still inhabit our memory, precluding any definite ethical assessment.24 The fourth moment arises out of the related fact that the literary provocation and our answer never converge. The temporal and (I would add) communicative hiatus defies symmetrical equality as demanded by the Golden Rule. The Other does not allow for a simple accommodation of ego and alter, me and the strange. It resembles sudden ideas, epiphanies and obsessions that come upon us, “dreams out of which we never fully awake” (66). The “rook-delighting heaven” in William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Cold Heaven,” Richard Murphy’s “Seals at High Island” _____________ 24

My juvenile reading of some decades ago—the seemingly good Dr. Jekyll who surprises by his stunning mutation into a bad guy or Frankenstein’s seemingly bad, yet essentially good, homunculus—has left images that are still present to me in many variants and shapes.

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(Murphy 83) stir us up, inciting our moral complacency (the latter especially with respect to animals). One might also mention Beckett’s novels as well as the many literary beings and implied narrators that refuse communicative consent. The asymmetry between text, context and recipient points to an ethical predicament, provoking perhaps communicative action and opens up a possible ethical horizon. 3. Three Suggestions Having the non-referential, event-like and pro-vocative character of literature as well as its semantic indeterminacy in mind, I would to like to confine myself to three more concrete ethical responses literature may call forth. The first is what could be called responsive dialogue. The reader responds to an unheard-of and singular literary experience as outlined above. The unheard-of-ness may express itself in a catastrophic event and moral crisis a character undergoes and the (non-instrumental, asymmetric, purposeless etc.) way he or she deals with it individually. The unorthodox, ambivalent and unexpected turning points of the narrative call forth an evaluative and ethical stance and prompt a dialogical exchange, since we are more or less uncertain about our conclusions. The discussions, conversations or debates which may therefore follow our reading mainly take place and are encouraged in institutional spaces, such as universities, schools or conferences. In some cases they even lead to a revision or qualification of fixed values. The second ethical answer derives from the mnemonic function, the mnemonic and historical responsiveness of literature and its belated readers. Precisely through its fictional openness, or plurivocal non-referentiality, it may give a present face and a voice to all those who have been bypassed by established historical writing. We enter into a—to be sure asymmetric—dialogue with the forgotten; it is their names, their faces and their memory, in their very singularity, which continue to ask us to remember them. The third answerability is mainly confined to the lyrical mode, and could be called responsive self-contemplation. This process need not at all be ethical in itself; here, as above, no ethical concept or theory interferes while I am reading. But lyrical self-contemplation may well be a precondition for sorting out one’s attitude towards and position within our human and non-human environment. We enter into a dialogue with ourselves visà-vis our environment in its dumb and mute, and hence pro-vocative, presence; what remains is the recognition together with the acknowledgement

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of something else in its necessity. On account of the interplay of the aesthetic and the ethic, of literary self-reference and extraneous reference, I would even go to the point of claiming that structural elements, the énonciation, may well contribute to the refinement of one’s moral faculties (in the weak sense of a more attentive attitude towards things, animals and people). Through this process people may even be reached who normally are not “committed to thinking in ethical terms” (Williams 71). It is true; a Nazi may cherish Romantic nature poetry and music, Eichendorff and Schubert, and nevertheless continue not to think in ethical terms. But a Nazi has never had and will never have the full intention of mimetically giving himself to the phenomenological otherness poems suggest. The totalitarian personality is driven by an almost pathological and/or petitbourgeois desire to control everything private and public. In point one and two the reader is urged into ethical or, as it were, cognitive-ethical action by either a disturbing or irritating literary event or even a guilty conscience. On the one hand, s/he wants to understand, on the other, cannot help. In point three there is at least initially nothing that makes us do something. Phenomenological (aesthetic) experience may simply lead to a more considerate and contemplative or non-instrumental attitude towards the world. In all three points there is a provocation: of the un-heard-of, the dead and suffering, the dumb creature, mute environment. 3.1 The Provocation of the Un-heard-of Not long ago I read the novel Disgrace by the South African author J.M. Coetzee. The story is about David Lurie, a rather sex-obsessed professor of literature. Lurie engages in a somewhat one-sided affair with a (presumably black) student whom he nearly rapes. But when as a consequence he is summoned before a university committee (mirrored parallels with the “Truth and Reconciliation Committee” are obvious), he refuses to defend himself. In fact, he pleads guilty, yet is neither prepared to confess in public nor to repent. “Repentance” he stubbornly tells the benevolent chair of the committee, “is neither here nor there” (Disgrace 58). He is expelled from his university for sexual misdemeanor, shuns all absolution and leaves to visit his estranged daughter Lucy on her small farm and animal shelter in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. It is a journey into the open without particular expectations. Lurie does not express any intention

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of seeking forms of “atonement” or offering some “recompensation.”25 In fact he continues to hold on and give in to his (according to the given standards) amoral and reckless sexuality. And the specialist in Romantic literature does this even in a reflexive way, quoting (albeit perhaps not quite seriously) the great (anti-)moralist William Blake for legitimization: “‘Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires’” (Disgrace 69). And a little further down he deplores, for example, that his “attractive” (but lesbian) daughter is “lost to men” (76, see also 78). In any case, he is “not prepared to be reformed” (77). He has hardly settled down and agreed to his daughter’s suggestion to help out with her friend Bev’s animal shelter, when the catastrophe happens. Three black men savagely rape his daughter and devastate her property. He himself is nearly burnt to death, his ear disfigured. His daughter, however, instead of seeking retribution, as urged by Lurie, is determined to carry out the child begotten by the rape and even accepts the proposal of her black neighbor who seems to be related to one of the rapists and covers up for them. Lurie himself—albeit without any obvious connection to the incident—dedicates his life to nursing and, moreover, putting down derelict, sick and lame dogs which cannot be kept any longer. (Also, he tries to compose a silly and completely useless little chamber opera about one of Byron’s abandoned lovers with the help of a banjo.) He kills the dogs in spite of himself, even though or because he has taken a liking to them. More important in an ethical sense is his taking care of their cremation, making sure that their corpses are not broken and contorted when shifted into the oven. If this, in our belated interpretation, comes down to a form of atonement, it is, and that is the crucial ethical point, without calculation. It happens to him and he accepts it; just as he unbendingly accepted his dismissal (see Disgrace 66, 67). The service he renders to the animals is a kind _____________ 25

Horstmann suggests that Lurie is “not capable of apologising, compensation, atonement” (Horstmann 134). I rather think that he is simply unwilling to submit to the ruling moral standard of post-apartheid South Africa. Also, I do not hold “regeneration” as a motive for Lurie’s visit to the “platteland” (which he really never pursues) (see Horstmann 134). I believe Lurie simply wants to be somewhere else, uneasy about his university job, the institution and social developments in Cape Town: “There is little to hold him back.” (Disgrace 59). In the same chapter on Disgrace, somewhat surprisingly, Horstmann suggests that Lurie was looking for something that would allow him “an inhuman form of compensation” (135) for his earlier misbehavior. Lurie “imposes” upon himself a “disconcerting penance, atonement” (Horstmann 136). If this is so then it is subconscious at most and against his declared intention. The only quote that I could find and that might underpin an interpretation of compensatory morality is offered by the narrator in the context of the savage attack: “So it has come, the day of testing” (Disgrace 94). I also find it difficult to see a “daemon,” “drive or programme of self-destruction” to have taken possession of Lurie. (Horstmann 132).

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of purposeless purpose, a gift which does not include and which is not motivated by the prospect of gratification. Maybe it is the pure presence or the face of the suffering animals that arouses his empathy (earlier in his life he did not care about animals). He talks to his daughter, feeling “a light shudder of voluptuousness” through her and suddenly, without a particular reason or motivation, he goes out to the dogs, enters the kennel of an old and abandoned bulldog: “He stretches out beside her on the bare concrete. Above is the blue sky. His limbs relax” (78). There is no relation between his lecherousness and this act of assimilation and humility. When he finds two sheep tethered on a barren patch he unloosens them and leads them to place with grass and water. This is also without moral mediation, nor is it a matter of superficial sentimentality: “A bond seems to have come into existence between himself and the two Persians, he does not know how. The bond is not one of affection.[…] Nevertheless, suddenly and without reason, their lot has become important to him” (126).26 As to our duties or, rather, attitude towards animals he says “‘so if we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we feel guilty or fear retribution’” (74). This corresponds with an ethics that wants to evade the economic principle of exchange value. It counteracts the still dominant types of contract-based deontological ethics. There is one more instance worth mentioning. Lurie “had thought, he would get used” to putting down on Sunday afternoons the animals that have become superfluous and hopeless. But that is not the case. The more he has to kill, “the more jittery he gets.” One Sunday evening he is overwhelmed, and has “to stop at the roadside to recover himself. Tears flow down his face that he cannot stop; his hands shake. He does not understand what is happening to him” (143). According to the German philosopher Helmut Plessner, it is in the human expression of crying (and laughter) in which our humanity is most humanly revealed. And this is precisely because in anthropological terms it has always been an—exclusively human—way of dealing with the incomprehensible.27 Lurie has found in himself an ethical sense, which may be partly due to the “Kenosis”28 he has eventually come to in the “platteland,” yet there is also this confrontation with the pure being in its speechless presence. It is “humiliating,” but he has also learned to live a form of humility which is deeply ethical. His daughter offers another impressive form of moral reaction. Her atonement for the crimes of the Apartheid regime as well as personal fail_____________ 26 27 28

For a very similar interpretation see Attridge: “He finds himself relinquishing intellectual control in obedience to a dimly perceived demand that comes somewhere other than the moral norms he has grown up with” (176). See Plessner, “Ausdruck und menschliche Natur.” Horstmann 137, see footnote 36.

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ures turns out to be similarly radical. Unlike Lurie at first, she does not want retribution for the savage abuse she had to suffer.29 On the contrary, she is prepared to sacrifice much of her property as well as her female and lesbian identity. But this is at the same time conventional as it remains within the logic of the exchange principle. She believes she has to pay a price and does so willingly. The novel’s catastrophes, the breakdown of Lurie’s bourgeois existence, the attack on and rape of his daughter (against the background of the failure of the post-Apartheid government) are, of course, morally highly charged events. Yet they do surely not suggest a moral rule. They both bring about a kenotic crisis, a point zero, where one has to decide, for the better or the worse. The rock-bottom situation, open to various decisions, together with the unexpected twists and responses the plot unfolds, turns this novel into a paradigmatic ethical text for our time. I was deeply impressed, in particular by the idea that a person could take upon himself an utterly selfless, humiliating and, eventually, only symbolic service never to be recognized as such by any other person. However, what I took as a unique instance of an extraordinary ethos was soon questioned when I got into a conversation about the novel with a colleague of mine. While I was convinced of the ethical adequacy as well as the deep humanity of what was going on, he thought it completely inappropriate, even pathological. In fact, he insisted that both Lurie’s and Lucy’s forms of penitence had been actuated by an anachronistic and rigorous Calvinistic morality of self-castigation and self-denial. And he may have a point, since some of the religious allusions in the novel appear apt to support this view. The narrator, for example, speaks about “the day of testing” (Disgrace 94). when the savage attack, the catastrophe occurs. When Lurie returns briefly to Cape Town he is worried about the fate of the dogs while he is away: “For that betrayal, will he ever be forgiven?” (178). This religious mentality, a kind of moral fundamentalism, my colleague went on to suggest, was, moreover, one of the reasons for the harshly inhuman and proto-fascist rule of the Boers in South Africa.30 I was stunned. What I learned from this is that my upbringing in a strictly Protestant environment may still have bearings on the way I judge ethical or moral actions. My somewhat baroque colleague, by the way, was brought up in a very Catholic region in Westphalia, which, of course, _____________ 29

30

One should mention that Lurie himself is at first far from accepting the rape of his daughter (as he was not prepared to grant his daughter an independent individuality). He urged her to report the incident to the police and developed strong aggressions against Petrus, the black neighbor. On the other hand, one should not fail to notice Lurie’s complaint about the “puritanical times” in contemporary South Africa (Disgrace 66).

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makes him see acts of humility or atonement in a somewhat different light. Rather than the highly provocative text itself, which is open to interpretation, it was the subsequent conversation, encouraged by the institution of the university, that made me also question my own moral outlook on life. In the future I may be a little more suspicious when confronted with acts of self-negation, whether altruistic or simply out of an existential humility. 3.2 The Provocation of the Dead and Suffering My second point—the mnemonic responsibility of literature—has been suggested by what I think is one of the most existential needs of human beings, that is, not to be forgotten. Shakespeare in his sonnets made, of course, ample erotic and poetic use of this desire. But the history of literature is full of exclamations of the “forget me not”-type. It abounds with requests to be commemorated, remembered or thought of. One of the best-known is perhaps Christina Rossetti’s sonnet that begins: “Remember me when I am gone away.” Literature is particularly suited to meet this fundamental wish by providing the dead with a metaphorical face, a name and by making their voices disturbingly resonant. And it is again precisely the fictional status, its open referentiality, which is crucial for the retrieval of the anonymous, those lost in history, so to speak. It may thus work like those memorials to the unknown soldier which we find in nearly every town all over Europe—only much more vividly. (Memorials do not single out a particular victim, while still allowing or even encouraging individual reference.) We pay respect to a person whose existence and destiny can no longer be identified and verified, who may have left only traces. And we know that this is the least this historical person had hoped for. Literature, even though it is not factual, can at least hand down to us how his or her existence might have been or possibly has been. Hence literature may also help to remember the victims of the Holocaust, of the Stalinist terror or any other collective homicide without easily accommodating and trivializing their memory if it employs deconstructive strategies of rupture and indeterminacy. An example that tellingly illustrates the mnemonic responsibility of literature is offered by the Russian poet Anna Akhmatowa. As we know, the Soviet Union tried to withhold the truth of Stalin’s Regime well into the 1980’s. The ethical obligation of literature consists in granting an empathetic, participative, memory to the millions who were slaughtered under Stalin. There is a moral responsibil-

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ity, since we cannot betray the perhaps final and vague, yet existential, hope of the victims of Stalin, Hitler or Saddam Hussein, to be nevertheless remembered for once, sometime, somewhere. Let me quote from Akhmatowa’s introductory remark to her poem “Requiem”: In the terrible years of the Yezhow terror, I spent seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad. Once, someone “recognized” me. Then a woman with bluish lips standing behind me, who of course, had never heard me called by name before, woke up from that stupor to which everyone had succumbed and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there): “Can you describe this?” And I answered “Yes, I can.” Then something that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face. (Akhmatova 384-394, here 384)

The anonymous, faceless and suffering woman seems to feel at least for the moment something alive in her. And the reality of her lonely suffering need not have been all in vain and for nothing if someone is able to describe it, retain it and bear witness for those who come later. Thus individual history may become after all a communicated and, perhaps, even shared history, part of a common memory. We cannot close ourselves off to the appeal of the dead. Literary memory then works as a kind of counter-memory. It snatches and salvages from the stream of forgetfulness those who do not occur in supposedly factual historicist narrative. The seemingly insignificant voice resounds more often in Anglophone literature than one might think when reading the established accounts of its history: from the poor and common soldiers Bates, Williams or the Boy Robin in Henry V to the beggars and cripples of the early Wordsworth to Wilfred Owen’s “Doomed Youth” or W. B. Yeats’s “Crazy Jane” poems. The elegy remains one of the most prolific literary sub-genres, only think of Douglas Dunn’s elegies for his wife, or Seamus Heaney’s for his mother. One could also point out the British New Cinema, particularly the underdogs and losers in the films of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh or Stanley Kubrick’s monument that he offers to a Vietcong girl at the end of his film Full Metal Jacket. There is Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, or Spielberg’s Schindler’s List or the moving Australian Rabbit-Proof Fence about the children of Aborigines who, well into the 1940s, were snatched from their mothers, deported and forcedly married to white Australians. In recent times, apart from film and second-generation Holocaust poetry,31 the historical novel and, more specifically, historiographic metafiction, has shown to be particularly attentive to the memory of historical _____________ 31

The seminal work is Gubar, Poetry after Auschwitz: Remembering what one never knew.

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persons, merging actual figures and events with a fictional narrative. Among the most successful examples are certainly Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), John Griesemer’s Signal and Noise (2003) or Richard Powers’s The Time of our Singing (2003). The latter novel relates the story of the exiled German Jewish physicist David Strom and his African American wife Delia Daley, who met in 1939, and their three children, Jonah, Joseph and Ruth, all extraordinarily gifted musicians. The parents want to raise their children unharmed and unaffected by contemporary history, the racism that pervaded even New York in the fifties and sixties. But it is not only their “hybrid,” mixed-race identity that deeply troubles the children, they cannot escape history. Jonah, the opera singer, falls victim to the riots in Oakland after the verdict in the Rodney King trial. One of the many factual stories interwoven into the fictional plot leaves a memorial to Emmett Till as well as to the traumatic effect the bestial murder of the 14-year-old black boy might have had on black or mixed-race children of the same age. Emmett was brought up in Chicago. In 1955 he was sent to the south, to Money, Mississippi, for a summer stay with his uncle. After he had allegedly whistled at a white woman in a grocery shop, he was brutally mutilated by the woman’s husband and his half-brother, shot with a 45 caliber pistol and sent to the bottom of the river by means of barbed wire and a heavy fan. The murderers were eventually set free and made money by selling their story to a magazine. The outrageous event has been soberly documented in history books or encyclopedias (such as Wikipedia). But it is just as important that the boy’s person and personality is salvaged and re-membered and his suffering re-constructed—if only for the boy’s expectations for the future and for the memory of the barbarous crime that brought this future to nothing. The ethical purpose of fictional salvaging can only be performed if one avoids sentimentality, easy identification, “pity light.” In the Emmett Till case—as in Holocaust poetry32— writers must not run the risk of describing and recollecting the dead for the sake of the surviving and their peaceful conscience. Ethical memory means, most of all, a remembering on behalf of the victims. The horror they had to endure is, on the one hand, beyond words, understanding and accommodation. On the other hand, there must be some resonance, if only discernible in the silence between the lines. But the terror itself, as suffered by those who died cannot and should not be exposed in “belles lettres.” There may be allusions, hints, ellipses, left spaces, paralepses which may irritatingly point to the unspeakable. _____________ 32

I do not have the space here to go into this important and difficult genre and refer once more to the outstanding study of Susan Gubar.

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Powers renders a lively, and according to all evidence, authentic picture of the African-American youth, nicknamed “Bobo,” up to when he gets into the clutches of the white men and the torture begins. From then on the narrator keeps himself back, evading any graphic means to betray his inconceivable sorrow to a comfortable reader. The narrator starts by picturing the happy boy in the southbound train and makes him come back to life in the present tense: “The boy is fourteen, a shining child with a full, round face.” The narrative focus is on him: “He imagines he’s free” (The Time of our Singing 95, see also 98). Emmett is re-given a “glowing” face, a Self: “His eyes light with confidence,” a mentality and future outlook: “All life lies in front of him … his joy makes him beautiful” (96). And we also find him boasting and showing off with the photo of his white Chicago “sweetheart” among the southern, ‘backward’ and unbelieving kids. But he eschews any flourishing. Powers’s style is laconic, matter-of-fact and not at all sensational. This holds the more for the narration of the martyrdom of the boy, once the men have come for him after midnight. Now the focus is on the men (whose version of the event Powers has obviously used). What we witness is the incredible brutality and hatred of the whites which strikes us dumb, even or precisely because it is retold in a detached way, and a human being whose terrible experience has gone beyond our understanding. Powers refrains, with good reason, from conveying some kind of inner life of the boy, his emotional state. A few sparse remarks suggest his “dissolution” and fall into silence and nothingness: “The boy dissolves into a ball of blood and moaning” (99). And further on: “Till says nothing. He has gone where no human need can reach.” His “sense has run down to a standstill” (101). For once the reader is left behind with a just, appropriate, lively and sympathetic recollection, a momentary fictional resurrection, of an Emmett Till and the murder of this boy which becomes the more disturbing and irritable the more it eludes our comprehension. This is, I think, an adequate memorial and ethical literary way of doing justice to an innocent victim of just another historical “break of civilization.” 3.3 The Provocation of the Dumb Creature and Mute Environment The final point—the literary ethics of self-contemplation—rests on the doubling of perspective in the reading process as well as on an alternate view of the figures and objects presented in (mainly) poetry. The poetic speaker and/or reader observe(s) and describe(s) some phenomenon, say a leech-gatherer or a snake, in both a precise and an emphatic or sympathetic way. But since this depiction takes place in an artistic medium, his

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or her attention is redirected to the mode of description, how the snake is represented. Through this second perspective we are enabled to feel and to observe our emotions simultaneously. And we may find that these emotions of ours, hitherto directed towards the other, to animate or inanimate objects, have been inappropriate, just as the evaluation of the person or object itself has been inadequate. The reader might then come to an understanding which may see her environment for its own sake rather than in a morally and culturally and emotionally prejudiced manner or in instrumental terms. The aesthetic redirection of perspective converges with the inversion of our habitual view or depiction of our environment. Whereas in everyday life we look upon it either with complete indifference or, instrumentally, as a means to an end, in literature environmental objects frequently appear as subjects in their own right, with a purpose of their own, ends in themselves. They may look at us or behave completely indifferently towards us. This change of the intentional perspective is often startling, irritating and thought-provoking. Together with the second, aesthetic perspective this may prompt an alternative—a non-instrumental—relation towards the “Other” of our Environment. What I have in mind is particularly the romantic and post-romantic tradition of environmental poetry which ranges from the early William Wordsworth or John Clare to Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, Ted Hughes, or more recently Gary Snyder and Louise Glueck. But an ethical reading, which is in keeping with more recent theory, will have to forego an interpretative language that seeks to evoke a unity of man and nature— a trap into which so-called ecocriticism33 seems rather susceptible to stumble. There are certainly analogies between “the holistic principles in green thinking” and the “relational mode of thinking” in literary theory.34 And one must surely acknowledge that (according to the evolutionary “endosymbiosis theory”) the “first bacteria” are more closely related to us than we hitherto may have been prepared to admit.35 Yet I would like to continue to insist on the categorical difference between humans (poet or not) and their non-human environment. We simply do not have the perceptional and cognitive apparatus to know “what’s it like to be a bat.”36 Not to mention an oak tree. We cannot help reflecting and taking a secondorder view, our life is determined by a “sense of ending” and we are linguistic beings, but “what one speaks about, one does not have” (Novalis). _____________ 33 34 35 36

See Bate. Thus Tony Pinkney in a well-informed overview of “Romantic Ecology”, here 413. See Gras, here 55. Gras offers a convincing political, economic and ecological plea for environmental criticism, but he does not really tell us why literature should be doing this. Thus the title of a famous article by Thomas Nagel.

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Literary language, first of all, puts the intentional content of what it describes in referential brackets, non-functional and a-causal as it is. Furthermore, if it wants to be successful, it attempts at describing its environment as appropriately and precisely as possible. Appropriateness means a poetic diction that concentrates as comprehensibly as possible on the environment for its very own sake and not for other-directed purposes (for W.B. Yeats a swan is only a swan to the degree as it serves Yeats’s poetological interest, as a symbol for inspiration, for example). Thereby the reader may get the chance to perceive the bird in its own evolutionary right, with an individual, other and autonomous mode of—and right to— existence. Lawrence’s precise observation of “Birds, Beasts and Flowers,” mosquitoes, bats or snakes are also anthropomorphic projections and he repeats the false binary opposition of nature against civilization. However, he not only convincingly reflects upon our traditional educational attitudes towards snakes, he also manages very impressively to convey mimetically a respectful image of the snake: “He sipped with his straight mouth,/ Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,/ Silently” (Lawrence 349). Anthropomorphism is—in a sense—the only way of talking about non-human beings. Any poem is also always about the speaker or reader—our relation to nature. And it is, after all, a way to arouse sympathy, empathy and solidarity. There must be some common qualities, too, features to bring the other being into the range of our feelings. We naturally feel more for mammals, which may look into our eyes, than for insects, fish or reptiles. Wordsworth’s “things that hold/ An inarticulate language” nevertheless take on a dignity and presence of their own, which I think is thoroughly ethical. “By contemplating these forms/ In the relations which they bear to man,/ We shall discover what a power is theirs/ To stimulate our minds” (Wordsworth, “Not useless do I deem” 298-9). Wordsworth means, of course, our moral minds denoting, most of all, an ecological and respectful attitude towards our environment. In a little untitled poem from 1900 Thomas Hardy watches a blackbird (“‘I watched a blackbird’”). The speaker is prominent; it is explicitly his perspective and action (“I watched,” “I saw,” ll. 1, 3). From line 4 and more clearly 5 the bird takes over, as it were: Then he flew down, seized on a stem of hay, And upped to where his building scheme was under way, As if so sure a nest were never shaped on spray. (Hardy, The Complete Poetical Works 202)37

_____________ 37

Another edition has it: “And if so sure” (Hardy, Selected Poetry 210); “and if” is still in use in south-west England and a kind of reinforcement of the conditional.

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The first person “I” of the speaker withdraws, only to express in the final line admiration and wonderment about what a bird can do. The bird builds its intricate nest independently of human standards in a self-evidently intuitive and unquestioned manner, a manifestation of organic selfreliance. The repetitive pattern of the three ending lines and the threefold rhyme indicate the poet’s wonder and respect for the achievement of the bird as well as for the (in human terms) unlikely solidity and firmness of a bird’s nest on spray. It is ultimately the action of the animal that determines the reaction and response of the environmental poet. To sum up: the traditional and strong concept of literary ethics puts too heavy a burden on the shoulders of literature. Literature in itself does not necessarily suggest or cause a moral improvement of its readers. Instead I have suggested a weak approach which takes into regard the open as well as provocative character of literature. The post-conventional and reflexive modern individual cannot be expected to approach the text ethically and to ask moral questions. It can only be the other way round. The text must provoke ethical consternation, an inversion of intentionality. Rather than my preconceived moral framework, it is my subsequent response to the text, my answer or my communication with other readers that may have ethical reverberations: a possible revision of our moral outlooks, the commemoration of the dead, and a more considerate attitude towards our environment.

References Adorno,Theodor W. Negative Dialektik. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1970. Akhmatova, Anna. The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova. Ed. Roberta Reeder. Boston: Zephyr Press, 2000. Antor, Heinz. “Ethical Criticism.” Metzler Lexikon: Literatur- und Kulturtheorie. Ed. Ansgar Nünning. Rev. 3rd ed. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2004. 163- 165. —: “The Ethics of Criticism in the Age After Value.” Why Literature Matters: Theories and Functions of Literature. Eds. Rüdiger Ahrens and Laurenz Volkmann. Heidelberg: Winter, 1996. 65- 85. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Terence Irwin. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000. Attridge, Derek. J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004. Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. London: Verso, 2002.

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Bate, Jonathan. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition. London: Routledge, 1991. Bohrer, Karl-Heinz. “Das Böse: eine ästhetische Kategorie?” Merkur 6 (1985): 459-73. —: “Die Negativität des Poetischen und das Positive der Institutionen.” Merkur 598 (1999): 1-14. Booth, Wayne C. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace. London: Vintage, 2000. Cunningham, Anthony. The Heart of What Matters: The Role for Literature in Moral Philosophy. Berkeley: U of California P, 2001. Gardner, John. “Premises on Art and Morality.” Ethics, Literature, Theory: An Introductory Reader. Ed. Stephen K. George. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. 3-10. Gregory, Marshall. “Ethical Criticism: What It Is and Why It Matters.” Ethics, Literature, Theory: An Introductory Reader. Ed. Stephen K. George. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005: 37-61. Gras, Vernon W. “Why the Humanities Need a New Paradigm Which Ecology Can Provide.” Anglistik 14.2 (2003): 45-61. Gubar, Susan. Poetry after Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2003. Habermas, Jürgen. Moralbewusstsein und kommunikatives Handeln. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1983. Hardy, Thomas. The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy. .Ed. Samuel Hynes. Vol. 3. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985. —: Selected Poetry. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Horstmann, Ulrich. J.M. Coetzee: Vorhaltungen. Frankfurt: Lang, 2005. Hustvedt, Siri. What I Loved. New York: Picador, 2003. Kant, Immanuel. Kants Werke. Akademie-Textausgabe. Vol. 2. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968. —: Kritik der praktischen Vernunft. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1974. Lawrence, D.H. The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence. Eds. V. de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts. London: Heinemann, 1964. Luhmann, Niklas. “Ethik als Reflexionstheorie der Moral.” Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik. Ed. Niklas Luhmann. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1993. 358- 447. Murphy, Richard. New Selected Poems. London: Faber & Faber, 1889. Nussbaum, Martha C. Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. Oates, Joyce Carol. On Boxing. New York: Kensington, 1988. Pinkney, Tony. “Romantic Ecology.” A Companion to Romanticism. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. 411-419.

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Plessner, Helmuth. “Ausdruck und menschliche Natur.” Gesammelte Schriften VII. Eds. Gunter Dux et al. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1982. Powers, Richard. The Time of our Singing. 2003. London: Vintage, 2004. Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Shakespeare, William. King Richard III. Ed. Antony Hammond. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2000. Shusterman, Ronald. “Content, Qualia, and Event: Some Theories of the Moral Role of Metaphor.” European Journal of English Studies 7.2. (2003): 215-227. Waldenfels, Bernhard. Grundmotive einer Phänomenologie des Fremden. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2006. Williams, Bernhard. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1985. Wordsworth, William. “Not useless do I deem.” Romanticism: An Anthology. Ed. Duncan Wu. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. 298- 9. Wolf, Philipp. “Ethics of Literature: A Reconsideration with Three Suggestions.” Anglistik 17.1. (2006): 151-166. Yehoshua, Abraham B. “The Moral Connections of Literary Texts.” Ethics, Literature, Theory: An Introductory Reader. Ed. Stephen K. George. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. 11-21.

WOLFGANG G. MÜLLER (JENA)

An Ethical Narratology 1. Introduction: Ethical Implications of Narrative Technique The following attempt to lay a basis for an ethical narratology is related to the ethical turn which literary studies have recently taken.1 It is grounded on the hypothesis that the specific ways of telling a story and narrative point-of-view can have important ethical implications. It is well known that the explosion of work on the relation between ethics and literature has had profound reverberations in narrative theory and the practice of interpreting fiction. My own approach deviates from some of the assumptions held by scholars dealing with the ethics of fiction. It is, for instance, not its aim to make the presence of moral substance a value-criterion for fiction, as is the case in Wayne C. Booth’s study The Company We Keep. An Ethics of Fiction, whose alternative title is playfully suggested as “A Conversation Celebrating the Many Ways in Which Narrative Can Be Good for You––with Side-Glances at How to Avoid Their Powers for Harm.” Books should be, as the metaphor suggests, good company. Booth’s ethics of narrative transaction, for which he coins the term “coduction,” envisions a meeting of the minds of authors and readers with a consequent negotiation of moral values. Books which present “deliberate lies or debased visions” (Booth 42) should be avoided like bad company. Another position which I do not hold, although there cannot be any doubt concerning its deep significance, is Adam Zachary Newton’s concept of narrative ethics which defines “narrative as ethics,” stressing “the ethical consequences of narrating story and fictionalizing person, and the reciprocal claims binding teller, listener, witness, and reader in that process” (11). While Newton adduces impressive theoretical support in philosophers like Emmanuel Lévinas and Paul Ricoeur and while he makes a number of deep-searching and enlightening analyses, I do not follow his a priori identification of narrative and ethics. I prefer James Phelan’s procedure of tying “ethical response to the techniques of narrative itself.” of focusing _____________ 1

Only a few of the huge number of contributions to this alleged change of a paradigm can be mentioned here: J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading; Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge; Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack, “Introduction: Reading Literature and the Ethics of Criticism”; David Parker, “Introduction: The Turn to Ethics in the 1990s”; Daniel R. Schwartz, “A Humanistic Ethics of Reading.”

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“on the links among technique (the signals offered by the text) and the reader’s cognitive understanding, emotional response, and ethical positioning” (Living to Tell 23). My approach is, however, generically broader than Phelan’s who concentrates on I-narration—his term is character narration––and less strongly oriented to the reader’s response.2 Strategies of mediating moral values and alerting readers to moral issues and problems will be related to basic modes of narration such as (1) authorial narration which provides a moral orientation for the reader through comment and reflection, (2) point-of-view narration which makes it the reader’s task to decode the moral qualities of characters and actions, and (3) I-narration which, depending on the text’s subject-matter, confronts the reader with a homodiegetic narrator’s attitude to the moral quality of characters and deeds committed or witnessed. 2. The Presentation of Moral Attitudes and Problems in Authorial Fiction 2.1 Explicit Moral Evaluation and the Use of Irony by an Omniscient Narrator: Fielding Authorial fiction has a heterodiegetic narrator who claims omniscience and usually presents the world, action and characters of the story from a superior position, a position which is ontologically separated from that of the characters. This fact has important consequences for the presentation of moral issues. As a characteristic example of how moral values and judgments can be mediated in this type of narration, a passage from Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones is adduced, namely the comment on the two boys Tom and Blifil who grow up together in the house of Squire Allworthy: As there are some minds whose affections, like Master Blifil’s, are solely placed on one single person, whose interest and indulgence alone they consider on every occasion; regarding the good and ill of all others as merely indifferent, any farther than as they contribute to the pleasure or advantage of that person: so there is a different temper of mind which borrows a degree of virtue even from self-love. Such can never receive any kind of satisfaction from another, without loving the creature to whom that satisfaction is owing, and without making its well-being in some sort necessary to their own case. Of this latter species was our hero. (I, 159)

The narrator here reflects on two different mental dispositions, first, the temper of men who are always oriented to the well-being of “one single person” and, second, the temper of men who derive satisfaction from being devoted to others. These two types of soul are correlated to the two _____________ 2

See also his brilliant article “Narrative Judgement and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative: Ian McEwan’s Atonement.”

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characters of the novel. Blifil is categorized as an egotist, Tom as an altruist. The characters are thus placed in a given system of moral values. Basically, the opposition is that of “black” and “white,” or “good” and “evil.” The impression of a rigid black-and-white judgment is, however, avoided by the specific style of the passage. Explicit value terms such as “good” and “evil” or “warm-hearted” and “cold-hearted” or “honest” and “dishonest” or “true” and “false” are absent from the text. It is the reader’s task to find out the moral evaluation implied in the passage by recognizing the narrator’s rhetorical strategies. Thus the characterization of the type of man whom Blifil represents does not, at first sight, appear negative, when we read that his affection is directed to one person. Yet when we realize that “this one single person” is he, Blifil, himself, we understand that he is an egotist. The presentation is still more complex in the characterization of the second type, which paradoxically states that the mind of this type of man “borrows a degree of virtue even from self-love.” The reader must understand that the person who has a heart for others derives satisfaction from perceiving their well-being, which heightens his affection for them to the degree of love and, concomitantly, increases his own well-being. Fielding does not only present moral qualities in his characters, but he also analyses and comments on them, and he does so in a complex, ironic discursive style, which makes demands on the reader’s cognitive capacity. The moral values are not referred to verbatim, but the attentive reader is given the chance to discover the narrator’s message in a process of understanding. Fielding’s representation of moral issues and values also includes the reactions of the society to the different types of men. The socially streamlined Blifil, who creates an image of himself as a reasonable and pious person, succeeds in enjoying high reputation, while Tom, warmhearted, candid, and always ready to get himself into trouble, falls into public disgrace: “The vices of this young man [Tom] were, moreover, heightened by the disadvantageous light in which they appeared when opposed to the virtues of Master Blifil” (Tom Jones, I, 97). This social judgment is, however, reversed in the episode with the game-keeper. As it transpires that Tom has taken all the guilt of poaching on himself, to save the game-keeper from being sacked, and that Blifil has betrayed the two, Blifil is called “a sneaking rascal” and “a poor-spirited wretch,” while Tom is praised as “a brave lad, a jolly dog, and an honest fellow” (I, 112). The passage in question shows that Fielding has––in spite of his general division of his figures into positive and negative persons––a rather complex view of moral issues and the moral qualities of his characters. To sum up, it can be said that Fielding’s characterization of the moral qualities of his figures tends to be embedded in authorial comment and reflection and that the oppositions of “black” and “white” and of “good” and “evil”

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tend to be affirmed by the narrator’s value-position. In so far the orthodox ethic of the eighteenth century which Gilbert Ryle calls “[the Calvinist ethic of] either White or Black, either Innocent or Guilty, either Saints or Sinners” (114)3 is present in Fielding’s novels, although the complexity of his technique of narrative mediation and the continual exposure of socially accepted vices (vanity and affectation) and a tendency of defining virtue in defiance of social conventions make his moral position differ from a simple opposition of good and evil. The avoidance of explicit value terms in the passage from Fielding’s Joseph Andrews contrasts with the following characterization of the vain baronet Sir Walter Elliot from Jane Austen’s Persuasion: Vanity was the beginning and end of Sir Walter Elliot’s character; vanity of person and of situation. He had been remarkably handsome in his youth; and, at fifty-four, was still a very fine man. Few women could think more of their personal appearance than he did; nor could the valet of any new made lord be more delighted with the place he held in society. He considered the blessing of beauty as inferior only to the blessing of a baronetcy; and the Sir Walter Elliot, who united these gifts, was the constant object of his warmest respect and devotion. (10)

Jane Austen is one of the greatest moralists in the history of the English novel, but she rarely is as direct in her judgment as in the passage quoted, where the chief––or, rather, only––character trait of Sir Walter Elliot–– vanity––is divided into two subtypes––vanity of person and vanity of rank ––which are, then, methodically explicated. The authorial quality of this discourse is marked by its irony, which borders on sarcasm, when the effeminacy of Sir Walter is referred to––“Few women could think more of their personal appearance than he did”––and when his pride is related to that of a manservant whose master has been raised to the rank of a lord. As I said this type of authorial intrusion is rather an exception in Austen. Here is a––from a narratological point of view––more complex example, the presentation of Sir Walter’s daughters through the perspective of their father. Elizabeth, the eldest, who is as to outward appearance and conceit similar to her father, enjoys his highest respect. For his other daughters he has only contempt: His other two children were of very inferior value. Mary had acquired a little artificial importance, by becoming Mrs. Charles Musgrove; but Anne, with an elegance of mind and sweetness of character, which must have placed her high with any people of real understanding, was nobody with either father or sister […]. (Persuasion 11-12)

_____________ 3

For a wide-ranging study of the Fielding’s ethics see Martin C. Battestin; see also Linda S. Raphael 29.

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The passage is concerned with the “value” of Sir Walter’s children. In the father’s eyes the younger daughters Mary and Anne do not count, they are of “very inferior value.” At this point the narrator steps in. In an authorial intrusion, which consists of an adverbial phrase and a relative clause–– “with an elegance of mind and sweetness of character, which must have placed her [Anne] high with any people of real understanding”––Sir Walter’s evaluation is corrected. To Anne, a “nobody” in her family, superior qualities of mind and character are attributed which must place her “high” with discerning people. Austen uses different narrative modes (point-ofview, authorial comment) to present contrasting moral evaluations. 2.2 Restricted Omniscience and the Implication of the Reader in Moral Judgment: Trollope Omniscience is in narrative texts a complex phenomenon, which holds true also in regard to the representation of moral issues. An example of a quite complex omniscient narrator is to be found in Anthony Trollope’s novels. A title such as Can You Forgive Her? already shows that the process of moral deliberation is relegated to the reader. One of the central moral problems of the novel concerns Alice Vavasor, who breaks her engagement with an accomplished gentleman in favor of a reckless, ambitious man who wants to use what little money she has to support his election campaign. Her conduct is motivated by the desire of furthering his career and, thus, to have, at least indirectly, an influence on political life. At the very beginning of the novel Trollope refers to her as “she, whom you are to forgive, if you can” (I, 1). What is interesting is the fact that the narrator claims only limited authority in questions of moral judgment, as formulas such as “I fear,” “I feel,” “I think,” or “I do not know” indicate. In Chapter 11 the narrator makes it clear that too much deliberation in matters of marriage may be harmful, yet he couches his statements in a negative form, so that they appear tentative: “I am not sure, however, that marriage may not be pondered over too much; nor do I feel certain that the leisurely repentance does not often follow the leisurely marriages as it does the rapid ones” (Can You Forgive Her?, I, 109). When he, then, comes to the case in hand, his judgment is quite decided: “That Alice Vavasor had thought too much about it [marriage], I feel quite sure. She had gone on thinking of it till she had filled herself with a cloud of doubts which even the sunshine of love was unable to drive from her heavens” (ibid.). As to the question which seems to worry Alice––“What should a woman do with her life?” (110)––the narrator’s attitude is quite clear. Such considerations of principle he believes irrelevant. What counts is the moral

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foundation of life: “[…] if she [a woman] shall have recognized the necessity of truth and honesty for the purposes of her life, I do not know that she need ask herself many questions as to what she will do with it” (ibid.). It can be noticed that the narrator’s comment may assume varying degrees of authority and decisiveness, although there remains no doubt as to his moral position. The consequence of Trollope’s use of a narrator whose judgment appears to be tentative for long stretches in the novel is a greater complexity in the presentation of moral issues than in Fielding’s fiction and a stronger challenge to the critical competence of the reader who is intended to participate in the process of moral evaluation. 2.3 Authorial Comment vs. Point-of-View in the Representation of Moral Issues: Critical Distance vs. Sympathy Another aspect of Trollope’s narrative technique which heightens the complexity of the presentation of moral issues is to be seen in the fact that while the narrator’s comment appears to be critical of the moral conduct of his characters, the handling of point of view frequently causes sympathy and, at times, even empathy with them. There is, for instance, in the representation of Alice Vavasor’s moral conflict an alternation between critical distance and sympathetic closeness, the latter being the result of the use of free indirect style. The novel counterpoints two types of narrative discourse. It speaks with two voices in a way which looks forward to the amalgamation of authorial and figural narration in Henry James’s novels. Trollope’s treatment of Glencora Palliser will serve as an example. She has been pressed into marriage with Plantagenet Palliser, an unromantic man dedicated to his political work, and is contemplating elopement with Burgo Fitzgerald, an unworthy, effeminate degenerate whom she idealizes as a romantic lover. Having described Glencora’s passionate waltz with Burgo, the narrator treats her with annihilating derision, comparing her to a horse: “Then she put up her face, and slightly opened her mouth, and stretched her nostrils,––as ladies do as well as horses when the running has been severe and they want air” (Can You Forgive Her?, II, 102). An amount of sympathy is, however, conveyed, when her reflections on “the cruelty of husbands” are presented in a passage of point-of-view narration, which uses free indirect style: But what hard treatment, even what beating, could be so unendurable as this total want of sympathy, as this deadness in life, which her present lot entailed upon her? […] Would it not even be better to be beaten by him than to have politics explained to her at one o’clock at night by such a husband as Plantagenet Palliser? (II, 20)

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In this situation even the narrator expresses pity: Poor, wretched, overburdened child, to whom the commonest lessons of life had not yet been taught, and who had now fallen into the hands of one who was so ill-fitted to teach them! Who would not pity her? Who could say that the fault was hers? (II, 20f.)

It is interesting that the men with whom the two female protagonists in question are involved for a time in a morally dubious way, are treated by the narrator without sympathetic psychological analysis. Of George Vavasor, Alice’s cousin, he says for instance that he is incapable of forming friendships with men, but that with women he can “really associate,” but he adds, “I doubt whether for all that he could treat a woman well” (I, 162). Deadlier still is the narrator’s verdict on Burgo––“Had he been a man who ever reflected he must have known […]. But Burgo never reflected […]” (I, 343)––a verdict that is nowhere in the novel relieved by sympathetic inside views. As to their narrative representation the two women––Alice and Glencora––and the two men tempting them––George and Burgo––are treated differently. While in the portrayal of the two female characters, moral criticism is tempered by a sympathetic representation of inner conflicts, there are no such sympathy-enhancing elements in the representation of the men associated with them. The narrator’s distribution of sympathy in the representation of moral issues is, thus, also related to gender. 3. The Presentation of Moral Attitudes and Problems in Point-of-View Fiction: Jane Austen 3.1 The Use of Free Indirect Style and Moral Evaluation In point-of-view narration (heterodiegetic narration with a covert narrator), which arose at the turn from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century and was first extensively developed by Jane Austen, the narrator’s presence as an overt or explicit mediator and his/her authority as a dispenser of moral attitudes and values is reduced. As a consequence, one or more characters of the novel serve as carriers of point-of-view (reflector figures), without emerging as narrators themselves. Thus explicit moral judgment and evaluation are absent from this mode of narration, unless individual characters make moral statements, as the mentor-figure Mr. Knightley does in Jane Austen’s Emma, when he reproaches the protagonist for her tactless behavior towards Miss Bates. But as far as the act of narration is concerned, overt moral comment is usually excluded in pointof-view fiction, which makes it the reader’s task to decode the moral

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qualities of characters and actions. In this context it is specifically the use of free indirect style as a dual and frequently ambiguous voice which functions as an interpretative challenge to the reader. I will begin with an example in which Austen uses the free indirect representation of speech in order to indirectly convey moral criticism, a passage from Emma. The novel’s protagonist and her protégé Harriet Smith are on their way back from a charitable visit to a poor family, when they meet the village parson, Mr. Elton, who is on the way to this very family. They start talking about the need and distress of this family: The wants and sufferings of the poor family, however, were the first subject on meeting. He had been going to call on them. His visit he would now defer; but they had a very interesting parley about what could be done and should be done. (Emma 112; my italics)

There are two sentences inserted in the narrative report which refer to the parson, who declares that he will postpone his visit to the family in distress. One the one hand, these sentences are, through their free indirect form, marked stylistically in the narrative context. On the other, they appear thrown in passing, which may make the reader overlook them. The casual form of their insertion iconically suggests the easiness with which Mr. Elton postpones his visit, only to talk about his pastoral care, rather than practicing it. It is Austen’s narrative technique––and not any censorious comment––which makes it clear that Mr. Elton does not take his office as parson and his duty to care for the poor seriously. This example shows the subtlety with which Austen handles narrative technique in order to convey moral judgments in an entirely unobtrusive, yet effective way, a technique which demands a perceptive reader. There is a great difference between this technique of sensitizing the reader morally and the more explicit moral comment in Fielding’s fiction. Let us now look at the passage from Jane Austen’s Persuasion, which represents Anne Elliot’s perception of the manners of her cousin, Mr. William Elliot. The introductory sentence of narrative report is here put in square brackets: “[He sat down with them, and improved their conversation very much.] There could be no doubt of his being a sensible man. Ten minutes were enough to certify this. His tone, his expressions, his choice of subjects, his knowing where to stop,––it was all the operation of a sensible, discerning mind” (Persuasion 135-136). Anne’s evaluation of Mr. Elliot looks entirely positive. He appears as an ideal combination of “sensibility” and manners, which seems to strike the protagonist as admirable, a judgment which the reader may share. Yet the reader who knows Austen’s style may also be suspicious. There are, notably, the climactic sequence of noun phrases each growing in extent–– “His tone, his expression, his choice of subjects, his knowing where to

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stop”––and the hyperbolic tone of the concluding utterance––“all the operation of a sensible, discerning mind”––which suggest just a touch of irony. Also the fact that “ten minutes” are enough to convince Anne implies that an impression, resulting from an observation of such short duration may be false. And, indeed, Anne soon realizes that Mr. Elliot is too good to be true, so that it is no surprise that he ultimately turns out to be a hypocrite and imposter. Jane Austen’s subtle point-of-view technique here represents a process of cognition, beginning with a first impression which is in the following narrative corrected step by step. The reader is made to follow Anne’s character-reading, realizing, together with her, that excellent manners not grounded in moral principle are worthless. 3.2 Moral Criticism and Self-Analysis: The Non-Ironic Use of Free Indirect Style The free indirect representation of thought is in Austen also used to achieve moral criticism and self-analysis. An example would be a passage in Mansfield Park (1814) which conveys the inner turmoil in the protagonist, Fanny Price, who has to learn that her confidant Edmund Bertram has, contrary to his declared intention, decided to take part in a theatre performance against which she has the gravest doubts: To be acting! After all his objections––objections so just and public! After all that she had heard him say, and seen him look and known him to be feeling. Could it be possible? Edmund so inconsistent. Was he not deceiving himself? Was he not wrong? Alas! It was all Miss Crawford’s doing. (156)

The protagonist’s moral indignation is here indicated by expressive stylistic devices such as ellipses, exclamations, and questions, which do not belong to the language of the narrator, but to the inner language of the character, whose words are, however, not quoted directly. Compared to the moral commentary in Fielding’s, an epistemological and moral subjectification is to be noticed here. In the novel there is no other character who feels and thinks like Fanny and nobody else, including Edmund Bertram, knows her attitude to the occurrences in Mansfield Park. It is only the reader who is granted to her inner self. The free indirect representation of thought is designed to take the reader as closely as possible to the consciousness of the character. In Mansfield Park it is an important function of free indirect style, to convey a moral norm which forms a counterbalance to the moral corruption which emerges in the novel on all levels and in almost all the characters. There has been a heated discussion on the moral dimension Mansfield Park. A famous appreciation of the moral po-

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tential in Fanny Price comes from the pen of Lionel Trilling.4 Other critics, who look at Fanny Price as a real character, have run her down and even called her an “insufferable prig.”5 There is no room for me to comment on Michiel Heyns’s recent attempt to find elements of ironical subversion in the representation of Fanny Price: “Somewhat bluntly put, Jane Austen conceived a very serious heroine and ended up by finding her funny”(3). There may be an element of jealousy in Fanny’s moral indignation, but there is no doubt that in Mansfield Park Jane Austen puts her newly discovered technique of representing consciousness––which here consists in the focalization on the protagonist and the largely unironic use of free indirect thought––in the service of building up the moral profile of her heroine. If the heroine represents in this novel an uncompromising moral position which is exempt from irony, the moral criticism is all the stronger directed against minor characters such as Mrs. Norris whose prejudices and malevolence are, by the free indirect representation of her speech, conveyed with almost vitriolic irony. 3.3 Moral Criticism: The Ironic Use of Free Indirect Style As distinct from Mansfield Park, in Austen’s next novel, Emma (1816), irony is a hall-mark of the protagonist’s characterization. In the representation of Emma who believes herself to be the born match-maker and tries to manipulate other persons accordingly, empathy is tempered by irony. The reader is brought closely to the consciousness of the protagonist and at the same time kept at distance. An example would be the representation of Emma’s first reaction to her encounter with Harriet Smith, a rather naive girl with whom she has great plans: She would notice her; she would improve her; she would detach her from her bad acquaintance, and introduce her into good society; she would form her opinions and her manners. It would be an interesting, and certainly a very kind undertaking; highly becoming her own situation in life, her leisure, and powers. (Emma 54)

The free indirect form of the passage is so designed as to present the attitudes and ideas of the protagonist immediately. The reader is close to Emma, directly confronted with her active mind. However, the rhetorical form of the passage––particularly the climax of anaphoric clauses with the emphasized pronoun she, which is italicized in its first occurrence––indicates the hubris of the heroine who believes that she can recreate another person according to her own ideas. The reader’s closeness to Emma’s _____________ 4 5

The Opposing Self (1955). Cf. Heyns.

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mind thus coincides with a distance which has moral implications. The second part of the quoted passage expresses through a number of adjectives and adverbs (“interesting,” “certainly,” “very kind,” “highly becoming”) Emma’s self-righteousness and conceitedness as an aspect of her egocentricity. The stylistic form of the passage ironically subverts the empathy with the figure which is induced by the narrative technique. 4. Individual Moral Vision as Special Vision in I-Narration: Two Examples 4.1 Subjective Moral Judgment in Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye I-narration or character narration, as it has recently been called, is a wellworked area for critics dealing with the ethics of narrative. The reason for this predilection may be that ethical problems tend to be strongly character-related in fiction and that I-narration seems to offer a direct access to a character, which means in our context, to a character who is in one way or another involved with a moral issue. What is particularly intriguing is that in I-narration the act of narration may coincide with a character’s selfconstitution, which frequently has moral implications. The question of character––notably of moral character––is intimately connected with the fact that this character is in first-person narration a narrator, who––except for peripheral I-narration––tells his own story, the story of experiences he or she has gone through him- or herself. In prototypical I-narration there is an individual vision which is not relativized by the superior perspective of an omniscient narrator or the dual voice of point-of-view narration. From the rich field of diverse forms of I-narration I will choose examples in which the narrator is the protagonist. My first example is Holden Caulfield, the narrator of Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), an adolescent who is extremely critical of the falseness and pretentiousness of the world of adults, to which he tends to apply the attribute “phony.” Attempts to enter into dialogue with other people constantly fail, so that once he even plans to play the role of a deaf-mute: “That way I wouldn’t have to have any goddam stupid useless conversations with anybody” (198). But in the communication with the addressee of his story, an indeterminate “you” whose identity is never revealed in the course of the novel, he freely reveals his opinions and feelings. The novel thus combines I-narration and you-narration. On the novel’s second page the protagonist says of his brother, a writer whose stories he admires greatly, that “[n]ow he’s out in Hollywood, D. B., being a prostitute” (2), which means that he is selling himself to the cinema. This verdict is the result of the judgment of a boy

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who possesses extraordinary moral sensitivity. It is related to just this character and could not have been uttered in its specific radicality by another character of the novel let alone an omniscient narrator. This is what I-narration can achieve, the creation of an authentic voice and judgment, an individual vision, which is at variance with social norms or conventions. Holden’s vision pertains to an adolescent who undergoes a series of initiations. In so far it is related to a social group and his speech evinces features of a group language, a sociolect, but it is the moral basis of his character which makes him an outsider in the world of the adults and also in his age-group. There is no other adolescent as sensitive and intuitively conscious of moral values as he. 4.2 Pre-Rational Moral Action: Heart vs. Conscience in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn As it is characteristic of I-narration, the vision of the protagonist-narrator of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is subjective, but in this special case it is also particularly limited in so far as he does not, on an intellectual level, recognize the dilemma with which he has to cope all on his own. His problem emerges on a linguistic level already. His intention to set free his friend, the slave Jim, appears to him as a crime, a “low-down thing,” “nigger stealing,” in fact, and in religious terms, a “sin,” on account of which his conscience torments him: “The more I studied about this the more my conscience went to grinding me, and the more wicked and low-down and ornery I got to feeling” (Huckleberry Finn 262). His attempt to pray fails–– “the words wouldn’t come”––which he comments in the following reflection: Why wouldn’t they [the words]? It warn’t no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from me, neither. It was because my heart warn’t right; it was because I warn’t square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was traing to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger’s owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can’t pray a lie––I found that out. (Ibid.)

Huck Finn is an example of an unreliable I-narrator in a positive sense. To express it in a simplified way, he believes his conduct to be morally bad, when it actually is good. His inner turmoil is the result of a conflict of two value systems which co-exist in his consciousness, a conflict which pains him, but which is not intelligible to him. On the one hand, there is his true heart which prompts him to save Jim, and the other hand there are the norms of society and religion which put––under the name of “con-

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science”––pressure on him, so that his intuitively good moral decision is called in doubt and he is made to feel guilty. In this mental crisis, in which the categories of good and bad are jumbled and in which Huck seems to lose the sense of his identity––he believes that he is “playing double”––, he ultimately relies on a moral substance “deep down” in him, which remains intact in spite of all his doubts and self-incriminations. The depiction of this mental crisis and moral confusion of a boy derives its authenticity from the voice of the narrator. It is I-narration which makes possible the credible presentation of the situation of a character who goes without anybody else’s help through the experience of a moral crisis. An omniscient narrator’s explanatory report of the processes in Huck’s consciousness would not be adequate to the experiential nature of what the protagonist has to go through. And point-of-view narration would lack the quality of voice and its authenticating force which is essential to first-person narration. 5. Conclusion In this article the potential of narrative technique for the representation of moral issues and problems––which might well be the aim of the construction of an ethical narratology—could only be demonstrated with regard to basic forms of narration. It has been shown that authorial fiction with its omniscient narrator has a more or less explicit way of dealing with moral problems, which may be complicated by the use of irony and a reduction of the narrator’s reliability. As distinct from authorial fiction, point-of-view narration tends to dispense with explanatory moral orientation and to privilege the perspective of individual characters, inducing processes of moral recognition and cognition in the reader. As far as the representation of moral attitude and moral action are concerned, I-narration directly confronts the reader with a fictional character who relates experiences from his or her subjective position. The exploration of the moral implications of narrative forms and techniques could be expanded by looking at narrative forms which mix the basic types dealt with here, by referring to particular types and genres of fiction such as the epistolary novel, the fictional autobiography and the stream-of-consciousness novel or by looking at special problems such as the reliability of the narrator, the tension between narrated and narrating self and so on and so forth. Further aspects to be discussed could be the various forms of representing moral motivation and action and the moral implications of plotting.

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References Austen, Jane. Emma. Ed. Ronald Blythe. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983. —: Mansfield Park. Ed. R. W. Chapman. London: Oxford UP, 1973. —: Persuasion. Ed. John Davie. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990. Battestin, Martin C. The Moral Basis of Fielding’s Art: A Study of “Joseph Andrews.” Middleton: Wesleyan UP, 1959. Booth, Wayne C. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Davis, Todd F., and Kenneth Womack. “Introduction: Reading Literature and the Ethics of Criticism.” Style 32.2 (1998): 184-211. Fielding, Henry. The History of Tom Jones a Foundling. Ed. George Saintsbury. London, 1903. Heyns, Michiel. “The Moral Vocabulary of Mansfield Park.” English Studies in Africa: ESA 29 (1986): 1-18. Miller, J. Hillis. The Ethics of Reading. New York: Columbia UP, 1987 Newton, Adam Zachary. Narrative Ethics. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. Nussbaum, Martha C. Love’s Knowledge. New York: Oxford UP, 1990. Parker, David. “Introduction: The Turn to Ethics in the 1990s.” Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory. Ed. Jane Adamson, Richard Freadman, and David Parker. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 3-15. Phelan, James. Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2005. 23. —: “Narrative Judgement and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative: Ian McEwan’s Atonement.” A Companion to Narrative Theory. Eds. James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz. Maldon: Blackwell, 2005. 322-336. Raphael, Linda S. Narrative Skepticism: Moral Agency and Representations of Consciousness in Fiction. London: Associated UPs, 2001. Ryle, Gilbert. “Jane Austen and the Moralists.” Critical Essays on Jane Austen. Ed. B. C. Southam. London: Routledge, 1968. 106-122. Salinger, Jerome D. The Catcher in the Rye. New York: Bantam, 1964. Schwartz, Daniel R. “A Humanistic Ethics of Reading.” Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory. Eds. Todd F. Davis, and Kenneth Womack. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1999. 3-15. Trilling, Lionel. The Opposing Self. London: Secker and Warburg, 1955. Trollope, Anthony. Can You Forgive Her? Ed. Andrew Swarbrick. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991. Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 1885. New York: Dell, 1960.

BIRGIT NEUMANN (GIESSEN)

What Makes Literature Valuable: Fictions of Meta-Memory and the Ethics of Remembering1 1. Introduction Talking about ethics, memory and literature raises at least three questions which are central to the theory of literary and cultural studies. The first and obvious question is: What is ethics? When and on what grounds does something become ethically valuable? As we all know, the concern for ethics and value may be met with skepticism these days because any attempt to find definite answers will ultimately be suspected of promoting either tyrannically universalist or embarrassingly naïve values. Still, tackling the question of what makes literature valuable nevertheless seems to be a worthwhile endeavor because literature is always already enmeshed with values and it might be that these values do not make literature automatically valuable. The second question is: what is memory and what is an ethics of remembering? Memory is, of course, the stuff that fiction is made of—“made of, made by and made for” (Humphrey 73). Equally, ethics presupposes manifold acts of recall and recollection, individual, social and cultural. Yet, given the fact that acts of recollection are always imbued with present desires it seems less clear what it means to remember the past in an ethically responsible way. The third question is equally important and inextricably linked to the other two. It is the question of where to place and what function to assign to literature. Can literature contribute at all to the dissemination of cultural values and, if so, where is the ethical dimension that can be attributed to literature to be found? Of course, any attempt to answer these questions could easily fill more than one book and it would be presumptuous to claim that this paper could offer fully satisfying answers. Therefore, I simply want to offer some preliminary ideas on the interrelations between ethics, memory and literature. My aim is to show that what makes literature valuable in terms of its ethical dimension is not exclusively its content, but its aesthetic means of presenting that content: It seems to be a specific feat of _____________ 1

I would like to thank the participants of the symposium “Ethics in Culture” as well as Gerald Echterhoff and Marion Gymnich for very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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narrative literature that it can couple coherent representations of the world, of objects, moral messages and human agency with a self-conscious reflection of the impossibility of closure and totalization. Through this paradoxical structure it exposes the normativity of experience and thereby reveals its cultural conditioning. Literature in this view is not a medium that illustrates certain values or that can provide any unmediated access to them. Rather it actively engages with cultural values, categories and systems, within which we live and interpret our existence, and provides ever always new “paradigm scenarios” (Sousa 16) for evaluating the imperative to seek/assess? value. That brings me to my first question: What are ethics and what are values? The word “ethics” has been used a great deal in the last few years by literary and cultural theorists. Publications exploring questions of ethics in the arts, particularly literature, are abundant, and the attempt to connect literary and ethical concerns has been claimed as one of the most relevant developments in current critical theory (cf. Kotte 61). Steven Connor has even declared a “paradigm shift” and maintains that “the word ‘ethics’ has replaced ‘textuality’ as the most charged term in contemporary theory” (qtd. in Kotte 61). That the upsurge of ethics is anything but negligible is probably most powerfully underscored by the fact that a growing number of literary critics have insisted on an “ethical turn” within their discipline. To be sure, the scholarly discourse is anything but homogeneous. The only agreement among scholars from various disciplines seems to be that here is no unitary ethical movement, and that ethical criticism is a “pluriform discourse,” interweaving many different theoretical strands. Ethics, of course, is the traditional name for the philosophy of morals in general, which is to say, the philosophy that deals with questions of right and wrong, duty, responsibility and choice. It centers around the “ought,” which constitutes the ethical mode of presentation par excellence (cf. Harpham, Getting it Right 18). Humans have the responsibility not just to act as they wish, but to orient their behavior towards a general code of norms: “Within the given frame of their competence they are held responsible for someone or something to someone by an institutionalized or internalized authority that judges their behavior on the basis of a general code of norms” (Grabes 39-40). While this is a general feature, there is considerable disagreement concerning the prior stipulation about what is to count as norm and whether there are—at all—universal standards for defining what is good. Specifically, in the wake of the emergence or re-definition of various critical schools in the 1970s and 1980s—such as post-structuralism, feminism, psychoanalysis and Marxism—“the conception of ethics as based on universal moral principles was invariably denounced as heavily implicated

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in the metaphysical assumptions of the Enlightenment tradition and dismissed as a relic of ‘old’ humanism” (Kotte 62). Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Lyotard, Foucault and Lacan consider the ethos an unjust and limiting reification of value, a bad-faith apologia for the status-quo which “prevents the thinking of value beyond the mastery of the ego” (Connor 200). As Geoffrey Harpham (“Ethics” 387) put it, ethics became the proper name of “power, hypocrisy, and unreality.” Its supposed claims of basing judgments on universal ethical imperatives were unmasked as an effective means of suppressing freedom of expression and diversity of thought. Universalist concepts and categories are “variously identified with male (‘phallogocentric’) values, […] with the emotion of ethics vis-à-vis epistemology […], and—above all—with the Western Enlightenment metanarrative of reason, progress and truth” (Norris 37). Marxist critic Fredric Jameson (149) even maintained that it was “ethics itself” that served as the “ideological vehicle and the legitimation of concrete structures of power.” Other critics, like Michel Foucault or Jacques Lacan, echoed this accusation, arguing that a discourse that encouraged submission to an “ethical imperative” served primarily to mask the interests of a specific group of people and to suppress any differences of view along the way (cf. Kotte 63). “Truth” was regarded as a mere complimentary label to be attached to whatever fits in with these highly particular interests. Accordingly, the best that can be done in the interest of justice is to refrain from criticizing values and truths which are different from the ones we endorse (cf. Norris 25).2 Hence, in one way or the other, all these projects were about the dismantling of ethics. Yet, to put forward arguments against repression or marginalization of culture is, of course, to partake in a discourse that is all about right and wrong—however much the earlier uses of those categories may be revised (cf. Rainsford/Woods 4). For challenging the notion of value and the “good” has always already entered the sphere of evaluation. There is simply no standpoint from which one could possibly deny value without affirming something that has superior value “in the very affirmation of its denial” (Connor 203). In fact, any and every claim to break away from the necessity of ethics must result in proving that necessity, merely by being a claim. It therefore seems necessary to move away from both universalist notions of good and bad and from attempts to leave these concepts behind. _____________ 2

See also Norris (36), who explains the position of Foucault as follows: “The only means of respecting their absolute otherness—their entitlement to a discourse radically incommensurable with our own—is to suspend all judgments of right and wrong save those that promote the rightful multiplicity of language-games and which thus equate wrong with any move to restrict or suppress this open plurality.”

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In the following, I would like to suggest an idea which might indicate a possible way to go. First of all, this idea is based on the premise that “value is inescapable” (Connor 8). Of course, this is not to be understood as a claim for the objective existence of specific values, “but rather as a claim that the processes of estimating, ascribing, affirming and even denying value, in short, the processes of evaluation, can never be avoided” (ibid). John Fekete has made this point admirably clear: No aspect of human life is unrelated to values, valuation, and validations. Value orientations and value relations saturate our experiences and life practices from the smallest established microstructures of feeling, thought and behaviour to the largest established macrostructures of organizations and institutions. The history of cultures and social formations is unintelligible except in relation to a history of value orientations, value ideals, goods values, value responses, and value judgements, and their objectifications, interplay and transformations. (Fekete i)

Given that literary texts, alongside other artistic and non-artistic objectifications such as newspapers, Web sites, pictures or films, are products of their contexts to the extent that they take up and reflect the cultural knowledge of a particular time (cf. Nünning), they too—albeit implicitly— are heavily imbued with cultural values. Hence the claim that value is inescapable. The fact that literature is always already suffused with culturally prevalent norms and that it may even promote these moral values and principles explicitly, does, however, not necessarily render literature ethically valuable. Literary representations of values and the cultural value of literature are two quite different issues. Having pointed to the inescapability of value and evaluation, it seems, however, equally clear that the very interdependence between culture and value renders the notion of objective, absolute and unconditioned values obsolete. Because we as individuals only exist through constituting ourselves within contingent space by structuring and organizing the latter and thereby establishing categories like that of value and the “good,” ethics cannot be freed from particularity (cf. Antor 76). In this vein, Alasdair McIntyre (126-127), for instance, has shown that all ethics is always tied to the socially local and culturally particular. Ethical values are closely tied to the conditions of their emergence in a particular. Every ethics “characteristically presupposes a sociology” (22). The aspirations of ethics to universality are therefore an illusion. Thus, if the definition of what is good and valuable is culturally conditioned and therefore contingent, the ethical value of cultural products should be measured in terms of their capacity to reflect that contingency and to keep alive the cultural negotiation of what is to count as ethically valuable. What I want to propose, therefore, is an ethics which couples the perpetuation of values and ethically meaningful closure with a self-

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conscious reflection of the process of evaluation or “value-making.” Such an ethics does not teach us any particular lessons, but draws attention to the process of evaluation itself, thus stimulating the ability to question established notions of value and initiating processes of change. By resisting closure it engages us in an open process of negotiation and renegotiation of different evaluations and induces us to question our own strategies of sense-making as well as the norms that guide these strategies (cf. Shusterman 33). It makes us aware of our own interpretational endeavors, pointing to the fact that the decision for one particular interpretation is in itself highly ethical. Hence, the ethics I want to propose is not primarily content-oriented, but one which is implicated in the aesthetics of form, i.e., in an aesthetic that restores complexity against reductionist simplification of experience. Of course, there is no denying that literature expresses and stages explicit moral values and that the represented content of literature, too, can have ethical implications and a moral effect on readers. We just have to think of novels like Tom Jones and later Pride and Prejudice and Middlemarch, which each tried to school their readership in the correct evaluation of and response to character and moral situation. More overtly sentimental fiction like Pamela, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Dombey and Son or Hard Times aimed at instructing response by inducing identificatory states of compassion and pity (cf. Newton 9). The problems, however, with content-oriented or representational approaches to literature as put forward by Booth or Nussbaum is that there is simply no intra-textual criterion which would allow us to decide which of the staged or expressed values are positive ones, at all. In order to resolve which maxims or forms of behavior are to be taken as “correct” or acceptable, readers necessarily have to resort to extra-textual, that is, culturally pre-existing codes, thus ultimately leaving the realm of literature (cf. Shusterman 30). Moreover, even if we grant that literature represents ethical behavior, which appeals to the reader cognitively and/or emotionally and can thus induce empathy, this need not necessarily lead to an ethically relevant insight or have effects on our own behavior (cf. Wolf 152-153). And, last but not least, what is emotionally engaging and intellectually appealing in and about literature certainly need not be conducive to our moral standards. We all know about the (fairly unethical) fascination with evil characters, the ugly and abject, and with the morally repulsive and terrifying. At least from a content-oriented perspective, then, a conflict between literature and the demands of ethics seems inescapable. Given these problems, it seems more promising to argue that the ethical dimension of fiction is to be found in the very form of literary representation: A literary text achieves ethical value through the ostensible in-

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terplay between content and the reflection on that content, which concomitantly motivates an interaction between the reader and the text. It seems to be a specific feat of literature that it can divide its narrative into enunciation and enoncé (that is, into story and discourse) and thereby reveal its own means of constructing values.3 Such self-reflexive texts are motivated by an imperative to reflect upon the processes of evaluation and thus avoid the appropriation of the content. The story and discourse or the “what” and the “how” continually transact with and against each other, continually produce, enlarge and question each other’s meaning through their very antagonism. Due to this paradoxical structure, literature confronts closure with its inherent contradictions and engages us in an ongoing dialogue with different avenues to interpreting the world. Selfreflexive literature cultivates our attention to different ways of meaning making in the particular situation, an acute observation of different possibilities. In this sense, any of our interpretations involves an awareness of the nature of choice and a questioning of the principles that guide our evaluation. As literature is apt to make us aware that the “multiply configurable is always configurable otherwise” (Smith 25) it can also make us more aware of the norms that we base our interpretations on. In a broader sense this awareness also implies that we accept responsibility for the interpretations we make and the norms we endorse. Ethics, therefore, should be conceived of as involving a self-reflexivity, “evaluating values themselves” (Connor 3). It is not to be thought of as a coherent set of rules, imperatives and principles or even as a distinct form of cultural discourse but, “as factor of ‘imperativity’ immanent in” (Harpham, Getting it Right 5) the practices of narrative, analysis and interpretation. It could properly be described as a “metaethics” (Shusterman 29f.), that is, an ethics which displays the processes and forms of judgment “without implying any concrete decision as to the application of these forms to actual content.” By this account, the imperative of value is not to be understood as creating fixed rules, but rather as an examination of the ethics of ethics, i.e., a critical distance to the represented moral message and an exposure of the strategies of symbolization. To the extent that culturally valuable literature encodes not only values but also their partiality, it engages us in the negotiation of meaning and thereby increases our capacity to imagine alternative cultural scenarios, alternative values and new “paradigm scenarios” (Sousa 181) for interpreting reality. Seen in this way, literature opens up a space where new possibilities of _____________ 3

Of course, this feat is particularly characteristic of narrative fiction. It should be noted, however, that drama and poems also exhibit various narrative elements.

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meaning- and value-making can be explored, thus initiating processes of transformation and precluding cultural stagnation (cf. Schlaeger 100). That brings me to my second main question: What is remembering and what is the ethics of remembering? Broadly speaking, remembering can be defined as the reconstruction of past experiences in the present. What is most often emphasized in recent studies of individual and collective memory is the constructive working of memory: Memory is not “an unchanging vessel for carrying the past in the present” (Olick/Robbins 112) but rather a dynamic process which operates differently in different contexts. The process of remembering is to be seen as an activity situated in the present, in which the past is continually interpreted and re-interpreted according to present needs and interests. Thus, much of what we “remember” is not an objective replica or mere description of past experiences, but an actively designed construct fulfilling current needs for meaning. Our memories are highly selective, and the rendering of memories potentially tells us more about the rememberer’s present, his or her desire and denial, than about the actual past events. This is particularly true for cultural memories because they require constructive and intentional fashioning to a greater extent than do individual memories. Therefore, recent studies of memory have redirected scholarly attention to “the importance of acts of memory for the present” (Bal xv), pointing out that the present “has designs on the past; it plans to appropriate the past for goals in the present.” What makes recollections important to the self or to social groups are not the memories per se, but the creative interpretations of these memories in the light of present needs and imagined futures. Ethically, judgments of memory are inextricably rooted in the present. An ethics of memory, as formulated by Avishai Margalit (The Ethics of Memory) or Paul Ricœur (Das Rätsel der Vergangenheit), suggests that we have a moral obligation to remember events of radical evil to ensure that they will never happen again. To the extent that ethics names the obligation to remember the hitherto silenced and de-privileged memory can form an arena of resistance to dominant forms of culture. Remembering in this sense is closely intertwined with questions of responsibility: Memory entails caring, a regard for the well-being of others in the present. Memories cause us to reflect upon the past, present, and future. They enable us to lead more reflexive and therefore more human lives. However, any ethics of memory which is merely content-based will ultimately be suspect of basing judgments on universal standards, begging the question of which and whose past is to be remembered. Who decides which past events or persons should be remembered? Again, I want to intimate that an ethics of remembering should be construed as a self-reflexive one, confronting seemingly mimetic representations of the past with

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the conditions of their creation. In this sense, commemoration does not refer to some unchanging core of memory, but to the continual act of reprocessing and representing it in the present, driven by the awareness that power dynamics as well as questions of responsibility and justice are inevitably implicated in memory processes. Andreas Huyssen rightly states that re-presentation always comes after, even though some media will try to provide us with the delusion of pure presence. Rather than leading us to some authentic origin or giving us verifiable access to the real, memory, even and especially in its belatedness, is itself based on representation. The past is not simply there in memory, but it must be articulated to become memory. (Huyssen 2-3)

Therefore, instead of trying to “provide us with the delusion of pure presence,” ethically valuable representations of the past highlight that, and how, they actively create meaningful pasts. Rather than pretending to lead us to some authentic origin, they disclose the fissure that opens up between experiencing an event and remembering it in representation: They maintain simultaneously a self-conscious and a realist attitude toward the past they represent. Acknowledging that memory is changeable does not imply that it is solely constructed through the needs and agendas of the present. It does, however, shift “the discussion of memory, in particular cultural memory, away from questions of truth toward the questions of political intent” (Sturken 7). In other words: The revelation of the constructed makes memory both political and subject to debate, thus precluding cultural stagnation (cf. Helms). The ethics of remembering I want to propose, then, is primarily an ethics of aesthetics: It combines the “what” of remembering with its “how,” thereby establishing an ongoing dialogue with the past in light of its present representations. The “what” and the “how” of remembering endlessly transact with and against each other, endlessly challenge each other’s meaning through their interplay. Through this self-reflexive stance every representation is made subject to the force of evaluation. Ethics opens the remembered to the aesthetic means of remembering, that is, to the indeterminacy of form. In this way, it affords a rethinking of every ethical imperative. The divisions and exchanges between ethics and aesthetics therefore not only regulate the play of value, they are also produced by and out of it. In what follows I want to propose that so-called metamnemonic novels or fictions of meta-memory provide a model for what a literary ethics of remembering could look like. Fictions of meta-memory combine personally engaged memories with critically reflexive perspectives on the functioning of memory, thus rendering the question of how we remember the central content of the remembered itself. To the extent that they not

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only present past events, but also reflect upon the possibilities of representing the past, these novels beg the question of what can be known of the past from a present point of view. In fictions of meta-memory, literary representations of memory are not only motivated by the attempt to recollect past experiences, but also by an ethical imperative to reflect on these processes of recollection. Debunking mimetic conceptions of representations, such novels critically engage in questions of retrospective meaningmaking, thus opening up a space where the meaning and value of the past can be negotiated (cf. Neumann). The interplay between the content and forms, or the “what” and the “how” of remembering is due to the division of the memory narrative into story and discourse. The “what” and the “how” of remembering continually interact with and counteract against each other, thereby questioning each other’s meaning through their very antagonism and entanglement. The form of narration will always be other than what is signified in narration. The “how” of remembering directly contradicts the logic of the memory narrative at the expense of the mimetic illusion, thus demonstrating that mnemonic reconstructions are heavily implicated in present needs and resist totalization. Instead of aiming at a mimesis of product they achieve a mimesis of process in which the portrayal of a remembered world continually recedes behind a self-conscious questioning of the limits of memory. Through this act of self-reflection, fictions of meta-memory also draw attention to their own status as a fictional artefact and thus ultimately destabilize their own representations. The revelation of the constructed nature of memory does not offer evidence of the past’s insignificance; however, it makes memory subject to debate. Hence, fictions of meta-memory straddle two contradictory impulses: they couple the desire for a coherent representation of the past with a selfconscious knowledge of the internal difference of repetition and language that we can never surmount as long as we find ourselves in the realm of representation (cf. Bronfen 121). By resisting translation into a single meaning and unified past, they make us aware of what it means to make choices and induce us to rethink our own notions of memory’s truth: If memories are always constructions guided by present needs, then we should, indeed, ask ourselves which constructions we can accept as part of our cultural horizon and self-understanding and which we should discard as “false memories.”

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2. Fictions of Meta-Memory: Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981) and Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family (1982) In the following I want to discuss two particularly striking examples of the genre of fictions of meta-memory, namely Joy Kogawa’s Obasan and Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family. Both novels are not only interested in reproducing ethically meaningful knowledge of the past. Rather, they also draw attention to how this knowledge is produced. Instead of belaboring the question of what should be remembered, of what is memory’s truth, these literary works focus on how often precarious past experiences are to be remembered, interpreted, and evaluated, and how their wider, political and cultural implications should be reflected. It is this concern with ethically meaningful accounts of the past that is at the center of Joy Kogawa’s novel Obasan. Indeed, Obasan has played a crucial role in the process of revising Canada’s hegemonic cultural memory. Writing as a Japanese Canadian, Kogawa “marks the entry of racial minority women’s fiction into the Canadian mainstream, challenging traditional white definitions of Canadianness” (Howells 204). Japanese communities have lived and worked in Canada for more than 130 years, but discriminatory legislation has led to their systematic marginalization and silencing in many sectors of social, cultural and political life. Only in the last three decades, during which interest in culturally more diverse literatures has continuously thrived, have voices from the Japanese Canadian communities finally been admitted into a broader public. Told as a fictive autobiography of a young Japanese Canadian woman, Kogawa’s novel breaks the barrier of a forty-year silence and focuses on the interment and dispersal of Japanese Canadians after Pearl Harbor (cf. ibid.). To argue that Obasan is concerned with giving voice to a previously silenced community raises the question of how this is achieved. And indeed, the “how” of this fiction of meta-memory is intricate. The telling of the past is not a simple, transparent process, but involves creating, constructing, reconstructing and challenging memories. The novel accentuates the difficulty of knowing the past with any certainty. Memory and multiperspectivity are the basic principles of the novel’s narrative organization. The multiperspectival structure of the novel presents the reader with a panoply of competing configurations of collective memory, which draws attention to ambiguous moments in the past. The result is a set of conflicted power relations, reflecting the entanglement of antagonistic memories and providing a compelling rewriting of Canada’s history. Hence, the sensibilities and scenarios of the novel are directed against the one-sided predominance of monopolistic cultural memories.

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At the beginning in particular, Obasan subordinates the question of what constitutes the past to the essential question of how a highly traumatic past can be remembered and narrativized at all. The homodiegetic narrator Naomi Nakane’s childhood memories during and after the Second World War, the forced fragmentation of her family, especially the unexplained absence of her mother (who never returned from a visit to Japan after the bombing of Pearl Harbour) are part of this uncertainty. When, not only as a child but also as an adult, Naomi tries to obtain answers to her questions about her mother, her aunt Obasan keeps silent. Naomi’s frustration over not knowing and her fear of knowing make her imitate her aunt’s apparently successful manner of dealing with the past: “Some memories [...] might better be forgotten. Didn’t Obasan once say, ‘It is better to forget’? [...] What is past recall is past pain” (Obasan 54). Hence, the first and ongoing failure for the narrator is that of language; as Naomi tries to approach the past atrocities, language falters and reveals its inadequacy. It is only when Naomi Nakane returns to Granton in 1972, after her uncle’s death, and finds the collected documents of Aunt Emily, an antiracist activist who insists on the necessity of remembering past injustices, that she has to admit that her silence leaves her emotions unresolved. Gradually, but still hesitantly, she becomes interested enough to engage with her hitherto repressed memories. In her slowly unfolding memory narrative she enters into an internal dialogue with Emily in order to persuade herself to approach the past: “The house in which we live is in Marpole [...]. It does not bear remembering. [...] ‘You have to remember,’ Aunt Emily said. ‘You are history.’ [...] All right, Aunt Emily, all right!” (49-50). Still, the problem remains that Naomi has to find an adequate format that allows her to capture the singularity of her past experiences. The anonymous and seemingly unequivocal nature of Emily’s documents, their cool facticity, cannot do justice to Naomi’s emotional ambivalence: “All of Aunt Emily’s words, all her papers, the telegrams and petitions, are like scratchings in the barnyard [...]. The words are not made flesh” (226). Thus, she searches for new modes of representation which do not betray the victim’s silence, but resist what Peter Brooks calls the “temptation to oversameness” (Brooks 109) and thus testify to the unrepresentable. Hence, it does not come as a surprise that when Naomi finally breaches her silence, she creates a narrative format which radically breaks with conventional representations of history, a format which enables her to regain the power of words. What we find in Obasan is a highly subjective and vivid picture of the narrator’s past experiences. Naomi’s memories are not concerned with historical facts but with her personal livedthrough experience. Her exploration does not pretend to be objective, or

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neutral: By foregrounding Naomi’s role as rememberer, the novel acknowledges that her selection of stories is tied to her current needs. By means of internal focalization she reactivates her childish ways of perceiving, thereby representing a highly subjective and emotionally involved version of the past: “Grandpa Nakane at Sick Bay? Where, I, wonder, is that? And why is it a cause of distress? [...] Past English Bay are the other beaches, Second and Third Beach, where I once went to buy potato chips and got lost. If Grandpa Nakane is at the beach now, could he be lost the way I was?” (Obasan 89). It is only later that Naomi learns that Sick Bay is, of course, not a beach, and that the Pool, which was established for the internment of Japanese Canadians, has nothing in common with swimming-pools. The narrator thus consciously refrains from presenting the past from the vantage point of her adult self and from providing explanations which are based on her superior knowledge. To the extent that internal focalization elaborates on the subjective details of the past and allows experiences of the very particular in their inner concreteness, it is a narrative strategy particularly apt to highlight both the narrator’s emotional involvement in the past and the subjective character of the narrative. This subjectivity is further is further emphasized by Obasan’s montage-like narrative structure, i.e., the incorporation of other genres, such as official and private letters, diary entries, telegrams, newspaper articles, and conference papers. Kogawa resorts to narrative techniques shared by many authors writing from the margins of the dominant discourses: “fragmenting the homogenous structures that smooth over differences; decentring the language, complementing one voice with another from a different space, including the silences previously excluded; foregrounding the problematic nature of language itself” (Brydon 105). Naomi’s approach to her past consists of gathering and retelling all the stories she has been told. Rather than presenting one coherent family history, she offers manifold and discontinuous stories of her community and thus breaks away from chronological succession and notions of causality. While all sequences are somehow concerned with the members of the family, Naomi rarely explains the connections between them. Some sections are only loosely associated; others remain virtually unconnected. The dialogic relations of the text, which self-reflexively problematize the ability to know the past, achieve what Miki describes as “relativiz[ing] the reader’s performance and draw[ing] her out of the subjective limits […] of the text where minority perceptions are encountered in what could be thought of as their foreignicity” (Miki 117). Naomi’s story becomes the site of heterogeneity, of the recognition that there is something which is beyond the realm of representation. As Lyotard has argued, stories which remain

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within that realm are necessarily complicit with the exclusionary politics that has silenced minorities (Lyotard 61). The narrative discontinuities, the “fragments of fragments” and “segments of stories” (53) resist translation into a unitary meaning and ask us to weigh alternatives and reassess meaning through the possibility of endless interpretation. Significantly, each of the incorporated documents offers different, sometimes incompatible accounts on the past. While the novel constantly evokes dates and facts of official historiography, it undermines their claim to objectivity and authority at the same time. These seemingly authentic versions of the past differ considerably from Naomi’s own memories and hence function as a contrasting montage. For instance, Naomi incorporates a newspaper clipping which reports the situation of deported Japanese Canadian field workers and which Emily has titled: “Facts about evacuees in Alberta” (Obasan 193). The article honors the Japanese Canadian workers, who are given credit for the increasing production figures for sugar beet. Naomi’s memories are, however, not compatible with the article’s representation of the past. Her memories of that time reflect not the economic success but the intolerable living conditions with which her family had to cope (cf. Helms). As she recites the caption of the article, she understands that ‘facts’ cannot be judged merely by drawing on the opposition of right versus wrong because they always intertwined with the rememberer’s viewpoints and present needs: “‘Grinning and happy’ and all smiles standing around a pile of beets? That is one telling. It’s not how it was” (Obasan 197). The double-layered retrospection creates a complex patterning, a tangle of contrasting and diverging memories, thus foregrounding the polyvalency of the past. However, while highlighting the limitations of any given account of the past, the novel warns we “readily capitulate even to those versions of the past that cynically falsify history in the interests of domination and power” (Kotte 99). Obasan insists that we must strive for ethnically more just accounts of the past and discriminate between more and less valid versions, even if we know that we can never obtain the absolute truth. The montage technique results in the fragmentation and pluralisation of Naomi’s memory narration: The gaps of what Naomi cannot tell are highlighted; therefore, narrative discontinuity becomes the dominant feature of her account. In contrast to the documents of Aunt Emily, which insinuate a transparent access to the past, Naomi’s narration shows that the interpretation of the past is never an easy process: “[W]e are trapped […] by our memories of the dead—all our dead—those who refuse to bury themselves. Like threads of old spiderwebs, still sticky and hovering, the past waits for us to submit, to depart. […] The full story never emerges in a direct line” (Obasan 30-31). The fragmentation of Naomi’s

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account and its exposed subjectivity, however, do not diminish its significance for the collective and individual revitalization of the forgotten. Rather, these narrative techniques show that the unspeakable memories cannot be frozen into objecthood. The fragmentation of Obasan requires active readers who fill the gaps and are willing to judge and value different accounts of the past. Significantly, the novel both refuses any nostalgic notions of historical truth as an unproblematic mirror of past events and yet simultaneously insists on the necessity of value judgments when negotiating “memory’s truth.” Hence, Obasan offers a hybrid cross-over between the postmodern text, “whose ethical gesture consists in a self-conscious reference to its own signifying process” (Bronfen 131), and the text of realism, aiming at an ethically meaningful and valuable representation of the hitherto forgotten. Knowing that memory does not give us verifiable access to the real, the novel nevertheless asserts the need for commitment as it strives to establish a presumably more morally meaningful version of the past than provided by the dominant discourse of the past: “You have to remember […]. You are your history” (Obasan 60). The meaning of memories may be forever troubled and troubling, but there is no denying the importance of these memories. In its very structure, then, the novel performs the paradoxical task of creating a meaningful past and simultaneously submitting this past to continuous evaluation. The intricate interplay between the “what” and the “how” reveals any attempt to achieve closure on the past as provisional, so that we as readers are asked to renegotiate meaning through the possibilities of ever alternative versions of the past. The paradoxical narrative structure not only serves to prevent the process of collective forgetting which originally motivated the writing of the novel as it calls for readers that fill in the gaps. Rather it also corresponds to a moral dilemma and, therefore, reinforces our consciousness of what it means to decide which versions of the past we accept as a part of our cultural horizon. As Kogawa’s book becomes a panorama of what interpretations of the past are possible, it makes us more aware of the norms that guide our own interpretations of the (fictional) narratives of the past and the present. After all, memory is what we make of it, and, in the words of John Tosh, “[h]ow well the job is done has a bearing on the cohesion of society and its renewal and adaptation in the future” (Tosh 2). Just as in the case of Obasan, Michael Ondaatje’s fiction of metamemory Running in the Family understands and enacts remembering as dispersion, construction and reconstruction rather than a return to origins. Consisting of apparently unstructured and haphazardly placed vignettes of varied lengths, interspersed with poetry, maps, pictures of life in Ceylon and snapshots from the family album, the autobiographical novel is

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Ondaatje’s effort to recapture the world of his parents, which he knew mostly from fragments of stories he had heard as a child. However, if anything, Running in the Family challenges rather than confirms the notion of an authentic past as it presents Ondaatje’s memories as merely one possible configuration of the past (cf. Pesch 57). By constantly referring to the media in which memories are transmitted, Ondaatje exposes the limits of retrospective meaning-making. Throughout the narrative, the references to media offer a disruptive commentary on the memoirs which presents the events from a different angle and thus draws our attention to the form and the implications of interpretations. By providing ever new appraisals of the past, the novel can teach us in the evaluation of competing possibilities and the nature of meaning-making. Having left Ceylon for England and Canada at the age of 11, after his parents’ divorce, Ondaatje’s novel chronicles his return 15 years later. The compulsive need that takes him back to Asia springs from the realization in his mid-thirties that he had “slipped past a childhood I had ignored and not understood” (Running in the Family 22). He is especially keen to reconstruct the story of his deceased father, who was almost a complete stranger to him. With his return to Ceylon an almost manic and often desperate search for memory traces begins. Michael tries to reconstruct his parents’ world through the memories and the stories of his older [or “elderly”] relatives, using them to bring back the long lost times. However, he repeatedly has to realize that what he finds are not authentic versions of the past, but only gossip, legends, myths and highly romanticized memories. His relatives embellish their narrations with exorbitant exaggerations and ascribe mythical dimensions to everyday events. Disillusioned, Michael draws the conclusion that: “Truth disappears with history and gossip tells us in the end nothing of personal relationships” (53). The elusiveness of the past becomes particularly evident when Michael attempts to reconstruct the last, most dramatic train ride of his father. Although three versions of this episode are known to the narrator, none of his sources qualify as reliable: One of them slept during the train ride, the second entered the train only later in the incident, and the third was too drunk to register any details. Nevertheless Michael evokes all three versions and thus derives his own account. The integration of these fictions of memories shows that Michael’s story, too, is just another ephemeral version, one of many legends, which appears less and less reliable due to its dubious sources and which is disclaimed with every consecutive narrative act. What remains of the past, therefore, is not a singular and well ordered account, but Babylonian polyphony: “No story is ever told once. Whether a memory or funny hideous scandal, we will return to it an hour later and retell the story with additions and this time a few

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judgments thrown in” (26). Instead of disguising these inconsistencies in a seamless narrative and imposing a linear pattern that would order his past, Michael presents a polyphonic orchestration of a multiplicity of voices in which fact and fiction merge. From this, features emerge of a multi-faceted past which defies all attempts at resolving dissonance. Acknowledging that there is no single source of origin, the novel affirms internal differences in a genealogy of dispersion (cf. Helms 65). The fragility of memory foreshadows the disintegration of the narrator’s own mnemonic narrative, that is, his autobiographical novel. Imagining how his father is reading a novel and thus trying to establish a dialogue which he was always denied, Michael observes that “ants had attacked the novel thrown on the floor by the commode. A whole battalion was carrying one page away from its source, carrying the intimate print” (Running in the Family 189). It is page number 189 which is destroyed and it is also page 189 of the novel on which the episode is told. Michael’s attempt to produce stability through retelling his past seems to backfire and becomes a virtual symbol of discontinuity. Through this act of selfreflexivity, the inadequacy of Michael’s memory version and the undeviating incompatibility between the past reality and its reconstruction are revealed. What remains of the past are not tenable facts, but mere fragments of memory, which have to be creatively completed. It is against this backdrop that the narrator comments that any attempt to reconstruct the past “makes your own story a lyric” (66). Running in the Family, then, does not seek a truth at all but seeks to testify to a past to which no definite truth can be assigned, thus showing all determinacy to be an illusion and pointing to those narrations which are never told. In the end, the polyphonic and incoherent information mediated in Ondaatje’s autobiographical narrative turns out to be superior to anything like a single “truth.” At the end of his trip down memory lane, all Michael has gained are fragile and often incompatible insights into his past. By self-reflexively exposing their conditions of reconstruction the novel leaves no doubt that memory cannot warrant an authentic representation of the past. Again and again, the how of remembering directly contradicts the logic of the memory narrative and discloses it as unreliable. However, towards the end of his book Ondaatje seems to have developed a new attitude. He maintains: “During certain hours, at certain years in our lives, we see ourselves as remnants from the earlier generations that were destroyed. So our job becomes to [...] eliminate the chaos at the end of Jacobean tragedy, and with ‘the mercy of distance’ write the histories” (179). If the book is a family narrative in this sense, which “eliminates the chaos,” then established notions of memory and narrative have, indeed, been radically redefined. Whilst the documentary evidence has remained incomplete and in

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need of creative addition, the oral stories are but mythic memories. Yet, the novel seems to suggest that is all we have, and both the rememberer and we as recipients will have to settle for it (cf. Pesch 65). When, at the end, the narrator remembers his brother’s admonition: “You must get this book right” (Running in the Family 201), he has to admit defeat. Nevertheless, he claims his ghostly father whom he set out to discover: “In the end all your children move among the scattered acts and memories with no more clues. Not that we ever thought we would be able to fully understand you. Love is often enough, towards your stadium of small things” (ibid.). A father who cannot be understood, but who has to be loved? The ethical overtone in the narrator’s claim is certainly not triumphant, yet it is neither defeatist nor resigned. Bearing witness to the unrepresentable, Running in the Family is both a narrative of mourning and an act of tending the empty center. For while memories can never be completely recovered and the past never be fully understood, there is no doubt that they exist and signify. The limitations of memory and the constructed character of narratives do not invalidate the knowledge of the past: “Ultimately, the incoherent and subjective information mediated in Ondaatje’s book, reflects its mediation and turns out to be superior to any attempt at representing anything like ‘truth’” (Pesch 69)—or some authentic origin, one might want to add. The awareness of not being able to get it “right” is no justification for simply falling silent and stopping caring (cf. ibid.). Love, the novel suggests, becomes the necessary fiction which allows us to take a stand and prevent us from falling into a cynical relativism and a persistent deconstruction of the past. We must take hold of our beliefs despite the epistemological limitations and irresolution which our accounts are prone to (cf. Kotte 102). By providing a multiplicity of tenuous and heterogeneous stories, Ondaatje, at least on a structural level, manifests a confidence in the ability of the imaginative writer to reclaim the past, to restore to history what was forgotten, marginalized or suppressed (cf. Heble). The novel presents the dialogic mode as a way of modulating from the condition of cultural forgetting into a declaration of the possibilities of cultural negotiation. By offering us competing versions of the past we, too, are forced into the action of weighing alternatives and discriminating between more and less valid accounts, thus reinforcing our consciousness of the principles of evaluation. As Ondaatje’s mnemonic account, this “well-told lie” (Running in the Family 206), asks us to renegotiate meaning through the possibilities of alternative versions it trains us in the production of ever new strategies for understanding the text, thereby bracing our awareness of the dis-

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courses that constitute the past and of epistemological habits that provide agreed-upon codes of interpreting reality, past and present. 3. Conclusion That brings me—by way of conclusion—back to my third question: Where to place and what function to assign to literature? How can literature contribute to the construction and dissemination of cultural values? The novels I have discussed share one feature: They both construct a pattern out of what interrupts patterns. In fictions of meta-memory, the transitory and fleeting nature of meaning-making becomes an intrinsic part of the textual experience. Through the entanglement of the “how” and the “what” of remembering, fictions of meta-memory reveal that retrospective meaning-making and the desire for coherence are “propelled by the drive to gain shape, without ever imprisoning itself into any of the shapes obtained” (Iser 19): The past becomes a source of a constant textual semiosis that exceeds all forms of discursive appropriation. Thus, more radically than other modes of writing, these novels expose the ambiguity, complexity and openness of meaning and value-making. In its de-pragmatization literature induces us to conduct “endless […] autotelic interpretation” (Shusterman 34), and asks us to evaluate the different possibilities and the nature of choice. Through their self-reflexive structure, fictions of memory prohibit appropriation, stagnation, historical evidence, political inspiration and moral lessons. Instead, they ask their readers “to respond to the inventiveness of the work in an inventive way,” to “affirm and prolong its inventiveness” (Attridge 36), thus stimulating a susceptibility to change and transformation. This recognition of diversity, multiplicity and heterogeneity is, in the words of Hubert Zapf, “not an artificially contrived complicatedness and elitist cult of difficulty, but a partially chaotic yet at the same time highly structured form of complexity” (Zapf 92), which corresponds to human experience. The insurmountable distance between the “what” and the “how,” the tension between the event and its representation would be lost if literature followed lines of thought governing the pragmatics of human life, in which uncertainties are usually eliminated by hard, unequivocal and fast definitions (cf. Iser 19). Instead of providing these, however, these novels make themselves into settings in which the very space between the “what” and the “how” of remembering launches multifarious patterns. As to the acknowledgment of culture and life as conflictive and competitive, this is not necessarily explicitly represented in literature, but it seems that the aesthetic of fictions of meta-memory is directed against the prevalence

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of monopolistic cultural world-models (cf. Zapf). In this light, the restoration of complexity against reductionist simplification of experiences appears as one important value of fictions of meta-memory. This value can be effectively disseminated through literature precisely because the intricate interplay between the “what” and the “how” encourages readers to re-evaluate the meaning of the past through the possibilities of alternative meanings. Fictions of meta-memory engage their readers in open and transactive processes of negotiation and renegotiation of old and new interpretations and thus make us aware of our ways of making sense of the contingent world. These novels teach the conflicts and ambivalences connected with any attempt of meaning-making: Just when we come to an end and think we can draw conclusions, the narratives circle back once more and draw attention to their own openness and multiplicity. Hence, at the end of his quest, the narrator of Running in the Family has to admit: “The book again is incomplete. Not that we ever thought that we would be able to fully understand” (Running in the Family 202). We too, as readers, have to accept the incompleteness of our own interpretative efforts, we have to weigh alternatives, envisage endless options and evaluate our strategies of imposing meaning on the text and—in a broader sense—on the past. Fictions of meta-memory, then, perform a specific task which cannot be performed by any other kinds of discourse: These novels testify to the paradox that any attempt to inscribe consistency into the complex inconsistency of the universe is bound to be temporary and provisional—even as they acknowledge the inevitable necessity of these efforts. This paradoxical structure confronts us, time and again, with the premises underlying our efforts after consistency that characterize our mental and social fabric. As these texts call for participation in the process of projecting meaning, they reinforce our awareness of the interpretative practices and concomitant values, biases, predispositions and epistemological habits and require us to take responsibility for the ones we endorse.

References Antor, Heinz. “The Ethics of Criticism in the Age After Virtue.” Why Literature Matters: Theories and Functions of Literature. Eds. Rüdiger Ahrens and Laurenz Volkmann. Heidelberg: Winter, 1996. 65-85. Attridge, Derek. “Literature, Ethics, Responsibility, Invention and the Other.” Ranam. Recherches anglaises et nord-américaines 36 (2003): 3537.

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Bal, Mieke. “Introduction.” Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present. Eds. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer. Hanover: UP of New England, 1999. vii-xvii. Bronfen, Elisabeth. “Romancing Difference, Courting Coherence: A.S. Byatt’s Possession as Postmodern Moral Fiction.” Why Literature Matters: Theories and Functions of Literature. Eds. Rüdiger Ahrens and Laurenz Volkmann. Heidelberg: Winter, 1996. 117-134. Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Vintage Books, 1985. Brydon, Diana. “Discovering Ethnicity: Joy Kogawa’s Obasan and Mena Abdullah’s Time of the Peacock.” Australian/Canadian Literatures in English. Eds. Russell McDougall and Gillian Whitlock. Melbourne: Methuen 1987. 94-110. Connor, Steven. Theory and Cultural Value. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Fekete, John, ed. Life after Postmodernism: Essays on Value and Culture. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988. Grabes, Herbert. “Ethics and Aesthetics.” Ranam. Recherches anglaises et nord-américaine, 36 (2003): 39-45. Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. Getting it Right: Language, Literature, and Ethics. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1992. —: “Ethics.” Critical Terms for Literary Study. Eds. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. Heble, Ajay. “‘Rumours of Topography’: The Cultural Politics of Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family.” Essays on Canadian Writing. Michael Ondaatje Issue (1994): 186-203. Helms, Gabriele. Challenging Canada: Dialogism and Narrative Techniques in Canadian Novels. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2003. Howells, Coral Ann. “Writing by Women.” The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature. Ed. Eva-Marie Kröller. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 194-215. Humphrey, Richard. “Literarische Gattung und Gedächtnis.” Gedächtniskonzepte der Literaturwissenschaft: Theoretische Grundlegung und Anwendungsperspektiven. Eds. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005. 73-96. Huyssen, Andreas. Twilight Memories. New York: Routledge, 1995. Iser, Wolfgang. 1996. “Why Literature Matters.” Why Literature Matters. Theories and Functions of Literature. Eds. Rüdiger Ahrens and Laurenz Volkmann. Heidelberg: Winter, 1996. 13-22. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Ithaca UP, 1981. Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. 1981. New York: Anchor Books 1994.

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Kotte, Christina. Ethical Dimensions in British Historiographic Metafiction: Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, Penelope Lively. Trier: WVT, 2001. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. London: Duckworth, 1981. Margalit, Avishai. The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002. Miki, Roy. “Asiancy: Making Space for Asian Canadian Writing.” Broken Entries: Race, Subjectivity, Writing. Toronto: Mercury Press, 1998. 101-124. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1988. Neumann, Birgit. Erinnerung – Identität – Narration: Gattungstypologie und Funktionen kanadischer Fictions of Memory. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005. Newton, Adam Zachary. Narrative Ethics. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. Norris, Christopher. Truth and the Ethics of Criticism. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1994. Nünning, Ansgar. “Literatur, Mentalitäten und kulturelles Gedächtnis: Grundriß, Leitbegriffe und Perspektiven einer anglistischen Kulturwissenschaft.” Literaturwissenschaftliche Theorien, Modelle und Methoden: Eine Einführung. Ed. Ansgar Nünning. Trier: WVT, 1995. 173-197. Olick, Jeffrey K. and Joyce Robbins. “Social Memory Studies: From ‘Collective Memory’ to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices.” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 105-140. Ondaatje, Michael. Running in the Family. 1982. London: Picador, 1984. Palmer, Frank. Literature and Moral Understanding: A Philosophical Essay on Ethics, Aesthetics, Education, and Culture. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Pesch, Josef. “Mediation, Memory, and a Search for the Father: Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family.” ZAA. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik. A Quarterly of Language, Literature and Culture XLC, 1 (1997): 56-71. Rainsford, Dominic and Tim Woods. “Introduction: Ethics and Intellectuals.” Critical Ethics: Text, Theory and Responsibility. Eds. Dominic Rainsford and Tim Woods. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999. 1-19. Ricœur, Paul. Das Rätsel der Vergangenheit: Erinnern – Vergessen – Verzeihen. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 1998. Schlaeger, Jürgen. “Cultures and Value.” Journal for the Study of British Cultures 9.1(2002): 95-107. Shusterman, Ronald. “A Metaethics of Reading.” Ranam. Recherches anglaises et nord-américaines 36 (2003): 29-34. Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988. Sousa, Ronald de. The Rationality of Emotion. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990.

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Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. Tosh, John. The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of Modern History. 1984. Harlow: Longman, 2002. Wolf, Philip. “The Ethics of Literature: A Reconsideration with Three Suggestions.” Anglistik 17.1 (2006): 151-166. Zapf, Hubert. “Literature as Cultural Ecology: Notes Towards a Functional Theory of Imaginative Texts with Examples from American Literature.” Real. Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature. Ed. Herbert Grabes. (2001): 65-100.

SIMON COOKE (GIESSEN)

“Unprofitable Excursions”: On the Ethics of Empathy in Modernist Discourses on Art and Literature Rising to the difficult challenge of responding to the tragedy of the terrorist attack of 9/11 on the Twin Towers in New York, the British novelist Ian McEwan wrote an article in the pages of The Guardian newspaper in which he identified the central issue of this most iconic and definitively 21st-century catastrophe as a matter concerning the ethics of “empathy”—that is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the “power of projecting one’s personality into (and so fully comprehending) the object of contemplation.” How, McEwan asked, can those who “simply watch the television, read the papers, [or] turn on the radio again” comprehend, let alone respond, to such an event? He reflects that, away from what is referred to in the vernacular as “the media”, as the “news” reverberates in our minds as we go about “our business during the day,” we can begin to take in the meaning of what happened, as “we fantasize ourselves into the events” and begin to ask, “What if it was me?” This, he suggests, is the “nature of empathy, to think oneself into the minds of others”; and it is a process charged with an ethical value that points towards the role of what might be termed the “novelistic” details: “These are the mechanics of compassion: you are under the bedclothes, unable to sleep, and you are crouching in the brushed-steel lavatory at the rear of the plane, whispering a final message to your loved one.” So begins an ethical engagement with events in which we are not “directly involved”; and the lack of precisely this empathetic mechanics of compassion in the minds of the terrorists, moreover, is what made their act possible: If the hijackers had been able to imagine themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, they would have been unable to proceed. It is hard to be cruel once you permit yourself to enter the mind of your victim. Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.1

It is also, of course, the business of a novelist: As the response of a leading writer to historical emergency in the mediated world, McEwan’s article provides a powerfully representative example, as well as a concise sum_____________ 1

Ian McEwan, “Only love and then oblivion. Love was all they had to set against their murderers”; all quotes from the online edition of The Guardian 15 September 2001.

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mary, of the prominent, if not central, role of “empathy” in contemporary discussions of ethics within (contemporary) culture, and the role this plays in assuring the ethical value of literature. The instatement of empathy as the “core of our humanity,” the foundation stone of ethical behavior per se ––with a lack of empathy lying at the root of wrongdoing and cruelty–– corresponds with what is now a pervasive idea from the most domestic to the most international arena, in academic disciplines as wide-ranging as child psychology and peace and reconciliation studies: the title, Empathy: The Way to Humanity (Kalliopuska), might serve as an umbrella term for defining the function and power of empathy in any number of specifically focused studies in a range of disciplines (and cultural spheres).2 Secondly, McEwan’s article stresses the contemporary urgency of this fundamental ethical capacity: the disseminations of the “media” increase the surface area of contact zones between individuals and cultures (thus calling for empathy across greater and multiple distances at an accelerated frequency) while raising concomitant concerns about the desensitizing effects of media saturation and the ubiquity of photographic images of those in pain (most prominently and powerfully discussed by Susan Sontag (Regarding the Pain of Others; At the Same Time). Though McEwan acknowledges here that journalism can respond admirably to such events, the inference that the very “media” by which the arena of ethical engagement (or disengagement) is expanded is itself insufficient to the task of promoting empathy. The line of argument, from a literary perspective, derives its clearest inheritance from the Romantic defence of poetry (broadly conceived); and McEwan’s words are very close in feeling to those of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry, composed in 1821, especially: The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action or person, not our own. A man to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. (681f.)

Though in Shelley’s own argument “poetry” is broadly conceived––and includes within its aegis the “sister” (ibid.) arts of music, painting, and architecture––in the contemporary debate, the term “empathy” as a watchword for this intense and comprehensive imagining has acquired such status as a fundamental ethical value that the degree to which different cultural forms and practices contribute to nurturing and extending its spheres and reach seems to have become an area in which the value of literature and other media are respectively assessed, championed, de_____________ 2

For empathy in child development, see Eisenberg and Strayer; for the role of empathy in socialization, see Hoffman; for the role of empathy in “everyday” encounters, see Ickes; and Stueber; for the role of empathy in multiculturalism, see Skolnick et al.

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fended––and sometimes even set against each other. John Carey sums up the argument when he writes that “[t]he imaginative power reading uniquely demands is clearly linked, psychologically, with a capacity for individual judgment and with the ability to empathize with other people. Without reading, these faculties may atrophy” (Pure Pleasure xi).3 Given the pervasiveness of “empathy” in accounts of ethical value in diverse fields, however, we might be surprised that the vocabulary itself is a relatively recent, early twentieth-century import into the English language; and, even more remarkably given the term’s service to championing literature over other media, it is a term which first appears in the context of the psychology of specifically visual aesthetics. Though the OED entry tells a complicated story, that “empathy” is a translation of the German word Einfühlung with roots in nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury German aesthetics can be asserted without controversy.4 The first written translation of the word is recorded as taking place in 1904, and is credited to the novelist and critic Violet Page (alias “Vernon Lee”) in a reference to “aesthetic empathy (‘Einfühlung’)” (Diary, 20 Feb., qtd. in Lee/Anstruther Thompson 337).5 The purpose of this article is to question the currently prevailing ethics of empathy by emphasizing the intermedial, distinctly Modern roots of the concept itself, putting forward the argument that “empathy” entered the English language as a visual-aesthetics term just as the concept itself came into crisis in the personal, social and cultural sense in which we use it today. Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy (first published in German as Abstraktion und Einfühlung in 1908) was an influential work that played a major role in propagating discussions about abstraction and empathy in European Modernist _____________ 3

4 5

On the other hand Carey also argues elsewhere that “[t]o believe that, from reading books, you know what it really feels like to starve, to be in continual pain, to watch your children die—in short, to subsist in the Third World––is not a refinement of sensibility but a trivialization of others’ sufferings. It is self-serving and crassly unimaginative to think that any amount of reading will allow you to share the feelings of people in such situations” (What Good 108f.). For more comprehensive histories of the concept, with psychoanalytic remit but more widely traced lineage, see Wispé. This is followed by the document more often-cited as the source of the coinage (see for example Carey, What Good 78): E.B. Titchener’s Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of Thought Processes, which describes the motor-mimic response to aesthetic experience: “Not only do I see gravity and modesty and pride and courtesy and stateliness, but I feel or act them in the mind’s muscle. That is, I suppose, a simple case of empathy, if we may coin that term as a rendering of Einfühlung” (i 21). Indicative, perhaps, of the relatively recent adoption of “empathy” as a watchword of intercultural understanding, of the ten examples provided by the OED, only the last two extracted quotations––from C.P. Snow’s Conscience of the Rich (1958) and R.L. Katz’s Empathy (1963)––refer to empathy as primarily a psychological response to other living (human) beings; the other eight, like Page/Lee’s and Titchener’s, all concern aesthetic response, motor mimicry, or kinesthesia.

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circles, and will form the basis of a discussion of both the art-historical roots, and the cultural problematics, of empathy as an aesthetic response.6 I will then turn to Virginia Woolf’s On Being Ill (first published in 1926) as a sustained analysis of the psychology and ethics of sympathy in interpersonal terms and highlight the remarkable parallels with Worringer’s critique of empathy in the realm of visual aesthetics, demonstrating that Worringer’s aesthetic concerns were echoed in the literary probing of the demands and limits of sympathy. For Woolf, reflecting on how we respond to illness (and supplying the title of this article), the pressures of modernity left only “laggards and failures” (On Being Ill 11) with time for “unprofitable excursions”(ibid.) into the lives, and sufferings, of others. 1. The Critique of Empathy at Its Visual-Aesthetic Roots: Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy––A Contribution of the Psychology of Style, originally completed in 1906 as a doctoral dissertation before being published in Munich in 1908, was written against the strong current in nineteenth-century German psychology of aesthetics, represented principally by the aesthetician Walter Lipps, which characterized aesthetic enjoyment as the result of the artwork’s facilitation of “Einfühlung” in the viewer. The pleasure we derive from art, so Worringer summarized the argument, was a form of “subjectified self-enjoyment. To enjoy aesthetically means to enjoy myself in a sensuous object diverse from myself, to empathise myself into it” (5); and, thus, “the value of a line, of a form, consists in the value of the life it holds for us. It holds its beauty only through our own vital feeling, which, in some mysterious manner, we project into it” (14). When “empathy” was first discussed in English cultural circles––first of all by Violet Page––it was this idea of empathy, as a kinaesthesic response to a pleasing visual depiction, that was being referred to. Despite the hint of skepticism in the reference to empathy’s operating in “some mysterious manner,” Worringer broadly agreed with this diagnosis of the psychology of aesthetics at work in Western art. His main concern, though, was not with the precise mechanics of mental projection, but rather with stressing that the “empathetic” urge dominant in Greek and Occidental art represented only one pole on the spectrum of creative impulses; at the other pole was the need for abstraction—an urge and _____________ 6

Though, surprisingly, it does not figure in even the most comprehensive accounts of empathy in literary and psychological studies; this absence is one of the justifications for this contribution among so many other studies.

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aesthetics Worringer found to be characteristic of “non-Western” or “African and Oriental” arts (15). Radically for his time (and indeed, if we look at much current curatorial practice, for our own)7 this thesis involved exploring the aesthetic value and psychological preconditions of nonWestern, African and Oriental—or “ethnographic”—“artefacts” as “art” (or, conversely and equally subversively, looking upon Western art as the expression of a local culture rather than a universal template for beauty). Worringer’s spectrum led him to a line of argument as challenging in its implications for the ethics of empathy today as it was to the then prevalent classicist approach to art history focusing predominantly on Greek and Occidental art: Any approach to art history that makes a consistent break with this one-sidedness is decried as contrived, as an insult to ‘sound common sense.’ What else is this sound common sense, however, than the inertia that prevents our spirits from leaving the so narrow and circumscribed orbits of our ideas, and from recognising the possibility of other presuppositions? Thus we forever see the ages as they appear mirrored in our own spirits. (11)

Disharmoniously with the currently prevalent view of empathy, then, the aesthetic experience of empathy in Worringer’s terms was continuous with cultural insularity; and exclusive focus on art promoting empathy represents a desire to re-confirm the Western value system based on Greek art, signaling the “inertia that prevents our spirits from leaving the so narrow and circumscribed orbits of our ideas” (ibid.). Put starkly, in Worringer’s terms, a privileging of forms in the plastic arts which facilitate aesthetic empathy prevents, rather than promotes, what we might now understand as the ethical imperative to cultural empathy. And if the policy of criteria for inclusion in the classification of “art” already has an ethical dimension in its historical context—i.e., it resists a hegemonic privileging of pre-Modernist Western aesthetics—Worringer takes a further step towards a directly ethical, as well as aesthetic, critique of empathy in more general, ahistorical terms, in arguing that empathy itself is psychologically, as well as circumstantially, concomitant with a personal or cultural confidence in a felicitous relationship between man and the world: Whereas the precondition for the urge to empathy is a happy pantheistic relationship of confidence between man and the phenomena of the external world, the urge to abstraction is the outcome of a great inner unrest inspired in man by the phenomena of the external world […]. We might describe this state as an immense spiritual dread of space. (15)

_____________ 7

I discussed some of the recent shifts in ethnographic curatorial practice, particularly in bringing Modernist artworks together with “ethnographic” displays, in The Art Newspaper’s annual The Year Ahead magazine of 2004; see Cooke.

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The urge to empathy, then, is aligned—in principle as well as in its culturally specific contexts—with a fearless and trusting attitude towards the environment; the urge to abstraction, conversely, is an aesthetic response to a sense of fear of an environment that seems threatening. In Worringer’s influential account, the desire for empathy results, historically, culturally and psychologically, from a confident and trusting familiarity with the world around us derived from an at least partial control over it produced by civilization. However far we might agree or disagree with Worringer’s interpretation of the psychology of style manifest in non-Western art (or indeed his methods; certainly, Worringer’s speculative view on “primitive peoples” is clearly open to critique as a work of Saidian Orientalism) it is immediately striking just how closely his analysis of the psychology inherent in an “urge to abstraction” in non-Western arts (not to mention his interest in its aesthetic value) corresponds with the keynote cultural aspects of Modernism in visual and literary (and indeed other) arts. Indeed, though Worringer did not include analyses of Modernist artworks in his book, the following passage culminates in what reads like a spiritualistic manifesto of the atavism and abstract formalism of Modernism—in literary as well as visual terms—down to its very vocabulary; indeed, Worringer, aware of the implications, does tentatively make that link: To make an audacious comparison: It is as though the instinct for the ‘thing in itself’ were most powerful in primitive man. Increasing spiritual mastery of the outside world and habituation to it mean a blunting and dimming of this instinct. Only after the human spirit has passed along the whole course of rationalistic cognition, does the feeling for the ‘thing in itself’ re-awaken as the final resignation of knowledge. Having slipped down from the pride of knowledge, man is now just as lost and helpless vis-à-vis the world picture as primitive man. (17f.)

The interpretation that abstraction in the artwork of “primitive man” might be related to a sense of vulnerability to a threatening environment resonates powerfully with the viewpoint that the Modernists’ increasing abstraction and formalism might be regarded as registering a cultural loss of mastery over an increasingly alienating and threatening environment. Indeed, Worringer’s interest in non-Western arts and in abstraction did bring him to the attention of the Blaue Reiter circle of artists, including August Macke, Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky (vii)8 and, in addition to its influence in this German milieu of expressionist artists, his book–– _____________ 8

This summary (and my reading of Worringer more generally) is indebted to Hilton Kramer’s excellent “Introduction” (Worringer vii-xiv) to the most recent edition of Abstraction and Empathy. For an illuminating account of the formative role of expressionism on Modern and subsequent art and philosophy to the present day, see also Lasko (Worringer is briefly discussed on p. 100).

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despite not being translated into English until 1953 (cf. viii)––also gained a readership outside Germany, in the English-speaking world, through a lecture by the Modernist poet and essayist T.E. Hulme, in London, 1914—“Modern Art and Its Philosophy” (vii). Hulme re-applied Worringer’s analysis of abstraction to the rise in “geometrical” forms evident in such artworks as the sculpture of Jacob Epstein and Wyndham Lewis’s paintings (thus crystallizing the idea of the “Modern” for such pivotal protagonists as T.S. Eliot). The influence of Worringer’s work in the literary, as well as visual, aesthetics was most definitively explored, however, only later in Joseph Frank’s essay of 1945, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” in which Frank drew on Worringer’s text as evidence for the thesis that Modernist classics represented “the exact complement in literature, on the level of aesthetic form, to the developments that have taken place in the plastic arts” (xiii).9 This remains the key literary critical response to the correspondences between Worringer and the Modernist literary canon (and indeed an important document of the correspondences between literature and other media) and has itself been the subject of much (often critical) debate.10 In particular, Worringer’s text and Frank’s interpretation has been caught up in the issue of to what degree the dread of space and the will to abstraction is linked to a contemptuous dread of fellow human beings, and indeed to a proto-fascistic turn of mind (a general argument that is given its most staunchly polemical embodiment in John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses [1992]). The literature on the politics of abstraction is now burgeoning; what is less often remarked are the implications of the other side of Worringer’s argument—his critique of empathy—and the significance of the fact that one of the major accounts through which “empathy” was first circulated through Modernist circles was deeply critical of the aesthetics of empathy on ethical and intercultural grounds, suggesting, indeed, that “enfeeblement of the world-instinct, modest contentment with an external orientation within the world picture, is always accompanied by a strengthening of the urge to empathy” (47). “Empathy” in these terms is a means of evading, rather than engaging, with the wider world. It is important to stress here, of course, that Worringer’s use of the term “empathy” concerns the relationship between a viewer and an aesthetic object, rather than the capacity of one human being to empathize with another. Exactly how the word transformed from a primarily aes_____________ 9

10

See also Stern: The “chief mode of literature” in the Modern period was characterized by a “weakening of the nexus between the private and social spheres” and “the burgeoning of consciousness beyond the world of common indication, and thus the undermining of the realistic convention” (428). See Frank for a compilation of critiques, and Frank’s response.

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thetic term to a watchword of interpersonal and intercultural relations would be a highly interesting, but gargantuan task; the aim here is to note that Worringer’s account of empathy as an impulse representing confidence in the world in Greek and Occidental art coincided with a loss of this confidence in his own time. A reading of empathy as the mark of a “happy pantheistic” relationship with the environment is coupled with a sense that this confidence is under threat, and that, therefore, the empathetic urge in art may—by implication at least—also go into decline. Here we might make the link to the interpersonal aspects of empathy, for it is clear that whatever interpretation we might offer of the urge to abstraction so evident in the cultural forms of Modernism, the pressures of the twentieth century certainly did all represent a threat to the capacity of the human being to empathize in the psychological and social terms we understand today. To call to mind only two of the relevant, well documented primary contexts: At one level empathy was threatened by the increasing drift towards the city, the increased pace of transportational and communicational technologies, and the rise of private individualism and metropolitan professionalism11—what sociologist Georg Simmel called, in “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (first published in 1903), the increasingly blasé attitude of city-dwellers. His account is a precursor of current concerns about overexposure to images and news resulting in desensitization (or, to stress the relevance to empathy more strongly, apathy—a lack of feeling): “The blasé attitude results first from the rapidly changing and closely compressed contrasting stimulation of the nerves” through which, eventually, an “incapacity emerges to react to new sensations with the appropriate energy” (Simmel 186). More brutally, the ravages of the First World War were to make the limitations of the psychology of empathy in human terms painfully evident. Indeed, we find in one of Sigmund Freud’s most direct responses to the upheavals of war, Civilization and Its Discontents (first published in German in 1930), that his pessimistic psychoanalytic assessment of the potential of empathy towards those who are suffering echoes Worringer’s critique of aesthetic empathy: “we shall always tend to view misery objectively, that is to project ourselves, with all our demands and susceptibilities, into their conditions, and then try to determine what occasions for happiness or unhappiness we should find in them” (27; emphasis in original). Empathy in human terms, then, strikes a parallel with Walter Lipps’ idea of aesthetic empathy as “self-activation,” and for Freud in interpersonal psychology as for Worringer in terms of the aesthetic re_____________ 11

See Trotter for an illuminating discussion of the links between the professionalization of English society and what he calls “paranoid Modernism.”

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sponse, this has complex implications: “This way of looking at things, which appears objective because it ignores the variations in subjective sensitivity, is of course the most subjective there can be, in that it substitutes our own mental state for all others, of which we know nothing” (ibid.). Thus, when empathy is transferred from an aesthetic to a human object—we think here of McEwan’s question—“What if it was me?”— the required confidence and promise of “self-activation” seems to undermine its ostensible altruism. Freud’s consideration of what happens when projecting oneself into another’s suffering (ie. when there is no promise of what in aesthetic terms was called “self-enjoyment”) culminates in a sternly conclusive cul-de-sac: However much we recoil in horror when considering certain situations––that of the victim of the Holy Inquisition, of the Jew waiting for the pogrom––it is nonetheless impossible for us to empathize with these people, to divine what changes the original sensitivity, the gradual diminution of sensitivity, the cessation of expectations, and cruder or more refined methods of narcotization have wrought in man’s receptivity to pleasurable and unpleasurable feelings. In cases where there is a possibility of extreme suffering, certain protective psychical mechanisms are activated. It seems to me fruitless to pursue this aspect of the problem. (ibid.)

If we now turn to one of Virginia Woolf’s lesser-cited essays, On Being Ill, we will find significant parallels with Worringer’s psychology of aesthetics founded on a sustained “pursuit” of precisely this “fruitless” aspect of the problem of empathy in interpersonal terms. 2. Literary Parallels: The Ethics of Sympathy in Virginia Woolf’s On Being Ill Virginia Woolf is not known to have read Worringer’s work itself; nor is “empathy” part of her standard literary vocabulary.12 Her work is, however––from the most general terms in its “stream of consciousness” narrative styles to the social problem of the “eternal necessity” of the Bellboy (To the Lighthouse 14)––deeply concerned with the reach, and limits (epistemological and ethical) of “empathetic” imagination in its plumbing of the inner life of (fictional) others. The question of sympathy, and its relationship to solitude, is an overarching theme; On Being Ill, an essay which, as Hermione Lee puts it in her introduction to the most recent edition, “is at once autobiography, social satire, literary analysis, and an experiment in image-making” (On Being Ill xi-xii). It is, in addition to being a powerful statement of Woolf’s commitment to the “daily drama of the body” (2), _____________ 12

To the best of my knowledge, she does not use the term in her work.

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perhaps her most sustained and nuanced meditation on the psychology and ethics in interpersonal terms of what Worringer called the “urge to empathy” in aesthetic form: both the human desire for the “divine relief of Sympathy”—accorded with capitalized significance along with “Fate” and “Civilization” and “Truth”—and, more penetratingly still perhaps, with what lies behind our urge to dispense sympathy with those desiring this “divine relief.” Woolf sets out with the observation that illness, despite its ubiquity in human experience, has a surprisingly marginal role in literature. Though this is perhaps more of a rhetorical foil––the convalescent is, after all, a prototypical Modernist figure––illness poses a challenge to sympathy in that it is an experience and a prospect which brings home our solitude, and, indeed, exposes the element of “self-activation”––to use the terminology of aesthetics––involved in sympathizing with those in need. In terms which echo Freud’s words above, Woolf writes of a hypothetical man whose experience of illness “cannot be imparted” and whose “own suffering serves but to wake memories in his friends’ minds of their influenzas, their aches and pains which went unwept last February, and now cry aloud, desperately, clamorously, for the divine relief of sympathy” (ibid.: 8f.; emphasis in original). At odds with a view of literature and culture as a medium for channeling empathy, Woolf proposes, contrarily (and in a complex tone we will consider shortly) that such products can only come into being through their deficiency in thought of others. If “Wisest Fate” prohibits sympathy, it is because [i]f her children, weighted as they already are with sorrow, were to take on that burden too, adding in imagination other pains to their own, buildings would cease to rise; roads would peter out into grassy tracks; there would be an end of music and painting; one great sigh alone would rise to Heaven, and the only attitudes for men would be those of horror and despair. (9)

Woolf’s words here anticipate the philosopher Cioran’s aphorism, that that living is only possible “par les déficiencies de notre imagination et de notre mémoire” (Cioran 46; qtd. in Sebald 169). To what, then, should we look for recompense in response to such a thesis? Or to put the Aristotelian question at a rather different pitch: How to live? Is the human store of happiness the corrector of the balance? Woolf points a different way; the following passage, which pinpoints with densely nuanced language both the demands and the limits of sympathy, in general psychological terms and in the specifically Modern context, is a central statement, and worth quoting at length: As it is, there is always some distraction––an organ grinder at the corner of the hospital, a shop with book or trinket to decoy one past the prison or the workhouse, some absurdity of cat or dog to prevent one from turning the old beggar’s

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hieroglyphic of misery into volumes of sordid suffering; and thus the vast effort of sympathy which those barracks of pain and discipline, those dried symbols of sorrow, ask us to exert on their behalf, is uneasily shuffled off for another time. Sympathy nowadays is dispensed chiefly by the laggards and failures, women for the most part (in whom the obsolete exists so strangely side by side with anarchy and newness), who, having dropped out of the race, have time to spend on fantastic and unprofitable excursions. […] But such follies have had their day; civilization points to a different goal; and then what place will there be for the tortoise and the theorbo? (On Being Ill 10f.)

What is so “uneasily” recorded here, and so instructive to a too-simple ethics of empathy, is that Woolf is not at all content with her conclusions; and the tension, the argument with herself, oscillates throughout the passage, the essay (and indeed her novels)13. The tone is that of someone world-wearily reminding us of an uncomfortable, would-that-it-were-notso truth. The ambivalence registers in the irony of the way that her argument against the possibility of sympathy (this is true too of Freud’s words above) involves the enactment and thus the exercise of the imagination of the suffering of others (she begins by stating the impossibility of imagining others pain and then proceeds to do so, citing numerous examples of those whose situation calls for empathy). There is an unsettling tension in the intriguing way in which the cause of the impossibility is attributed first to the eternal necessity of “Fate” (in the earlier quoted passage), and then to the culturally specific context of “civilization”, and then an even more localized and contemporary “nowadays”: Is it Fate, or Civilization, or early twentieth-century Western European civilization—that renders sympathy so problematic? It seems clear that this “problem” of sympathy is perceived by Woolf as a contemporary issue, as well as a general question. There is a feeling that the “laggards and failures” who “have time” for considering the lives of others—those not pursuing the goals of private individualism—have the ethical high ground; that the critique is in part of civilization’s impact in rendering sympathy—however skeptically we view sympathy itself— obsolete, and counter-cultural. The dissatisfied and searching quality of Woolf’s prose here is embedded in the highly condensed definition of sympathetic dispensations as “unprofitable excursions,” which folds the question of sympathy into the contexts of capitalism and individualism in “unprofitable,” and in the temporary, leisurely implications of the word “excursion” (from which one derives pleasure, and then returns). The rub —the sign that for all the rhetorical persuasion Woolf is essentially asking _____________ 13

To The Lighthouse was in its formative stages when Woolf wrote On Being Ill; the convalescent of the essay who cries out for the divine relief of sympathy is very much in character with the novel’s Mr. Ramsay.

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a question—lies in the last question in the passage: What place will there be for the tortoise and the theorbo? This is one of the deepest questions running through the essay—and one which is not answered in any categorical fashion. What is notable for our purposes is its divergence from currently prevailing views of literary value deriving from facilitating empathy: in stating the problem of the limits of sympathy, Woolf turns to literature not as a counter to these limits, but as a document of them. She first seems to respond almost directly (and skeptically) to Shelley’s idea that for “a man to be greatly good […] the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own” (Shelley 681), writing that, as for sympathy, those in pain can “do without it” and, indeed that [t]hat illusion of a world so shaped that it echoes every groan, of human beings so tied together by common needs that a twitch at one wrist jerks another, where however strange your experience other people have had it too, where, however far you travel in your own mind someone has been there before you—is all an illusion. We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. (On Being Ill 11)

The tone here is, at first, almost elegiac: it is—literally—a statement of disillusionment. Is literature then a means of breaching this gulf? For Woolf, the compensation arising from this skepticism is, on the contrary, that it becomes clear that “[a]lways to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable” (11). This is a deep ethical concern raised by the question of empathy; we might call it a concern over trespass into the lives of others. Counter to the Romantic engagement with Nature, Woolf suggests instead that its compensations lie in its being “divinely heartless” and in having “nothing to do with human pleasure or human profit”––that is, in the beauties of Nature it is “in their indifference that they are comforting” (14). (We should note how close Woolf sounds here to Worringer’s suggestion that a “dread of space” informed the will to abstraction in “primitive” arts.) Woolf links this indifference to the sphere of literary form; the consoling lack of sympathy in the prospect of nature is mirrored in the way that “it is the great artists, the Miltons and the Popes, who console not by their thought of us but by their forgetfulness” (15f.; emphasis added). This is a very different foundation for an ethics of literary value to that of the ethics of empathy. If we were to transform Woolf’s observation into a “defense” of specifically literary form, it would be for its role as a record of solitude more than as an exercise in sympathy. It is presented here not as a means of rejecting the role of empathy in literary form, but rather to indicate that placing empathy unquestioningly at the center of an account of literary value not only requires overlooking its more problem-

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atic aspects (and thus attaches the value of literature to unstable foundations) but also deprives literary form of a converse value (one especially salient in Modernist literature): the ethical defense of privacy. Literature–– and other cultural forms––have value in Woolf’s account (and again, this is one of the distinctive marks of Modernism) not through their promotion of “civic ardour” or engagement, but through providing a space for the acknowledgement of the essentially private and inaccessible aspects of human life. In this regard, we might suggest a democratic impulse present behind the will to abstraction and flight from empathy. Equally significant for our purposes in Woolf’s essay, is that this interplay between solitude and sympathy, and between the private and the public, also registers the profound influence of the “other media”––most especially the press. On Being Ill itself “did the media rounds”: it was first published in the journal New Criterion, (then edited by T.S. Eliot) in January 1926 (xvii-xix) alongside work by other writers, including D.H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, an essay by Cocteau, a “round up of foreign quarterlies” and a piece called “Aristotle on Democracy and Socialism” (xix); it was then published in an edited form in April 1926 in The Forum, a New York magazine––a “more glossy, middle-brow setting” (xix)—alongside robust discussion of “issues”; and only then published, in 1930, as a Hogarth Press pamphlet (xx). It thus cannot be looked upon as a realm of literature sealed off from the world of the press and the “other media”. And indeed, this interplay is a theme within the essay. The press is proffered (with irony) as the arbiter of significance: of the “endless activity of the sky” Woolf asks: “Ought not someone to write to The Times?” (14). And one of the details which makes On Being Ill very much in tune with our current concerns over the way in which we might respond to––in McEwan’s words––events in which we are “not directly involved” is in its brief anxiety over the impossibility of responding to a story in The Times about the misfortunes (and death) of the Bishop of Lichfield (22).14 Value is disseminated here, not so much through the specifically literary form, but through the interaction with other media; the journalistic details are grains of anxiety within the texture of the prose. It is here, I think, that Woolf’s concerns about sympathy begin to predict some of the cultural contexts that could explain how “empathy” has come to hold a higher standing than “sympathy” in ethical debates. There is a qualitative difference between the encounter with a friend’s aches and pains, and the ethical dilemma posed by the daily integration into one’s experience of a knowledge of (many) strangers’ fates. Though Woolf does not call it “empathy”, her thinking, in its mixture of skepticism and anxi_____________ 14

See also Woolf’s short story “Sympathy” in The Complete Shorter Fiction.

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ety over her conclusions, points towards the increasingly modern experience pinpointed by Ulrich Beck as the problem of “cosmopolitan empathy”: The tears we guiltily wipe from our eyes before the television or in the cinema are no doubt consciously produced by Hollywood trickery and by how the news is stage managed. But that in no way alters the fact that the spaces of our emotional imagination have expanded in a transnational sense. (6)

Though Woolf does not refer to empathy, her encroaching awareness of the impact of a mediated recognition of the lives of others with whom we are not directly involved is a definitively modern ethical dilemma. If we can characterize modernization and globalization as creating an increasing network of connections, as expanding the surface area of our interpersonal and intercultural contact zones, then the ethical imperative today is one in which we are required, not only to respond to a given situation as it occurs––to respond to an encounter in our immediate environment (with sympathy)––but to incorporate into our ethic a sense of what is happening elsewhere. Susan Sontag has meditated this problem with acuity in her essay entitled “At the Same Time”. Quoting Voltaire’s observation that “Lisbon lies in ruins, and here in Paris we dance” as emblematic of the dilemma of the traveler’s being “constantly reminded of the simultaneity of what is going on in the world” (“At the Same Time” 227), Sontag suggest that this raises the “question of sympathy […] of the limits of the imagination”; and, for Sontag, this is “why we need fiction: to stretch our world” (ibid.). The ethical authority of empathy derives, perhaps, from its capacity to feed into this new ethical arena. On the one hand it draws on the element of feeling, as opposed to rational thought; on the other, the “feeling” on which it is based must be deployed on cognitively ascertained objects or subjects. Empathy can, firstly, draw on the kind of creaturely humanity of “A Simple Heart,” the first story in Gustave Flaubert’s tryptich, The Three Tales, which relates how the “simple hearted” maidservant Félicité watches her mistress’s young daughter Virginie’s first communion and experiences “one of those imaginative flights born of real affection” in which “it seemed to her that she herself was in the child’s place. Virginie’s face became her own, Virginie’s dress clothed her, Virginie’s heart was beating in her breast; and as she closed her eyes and opened her mouth, she almost fainted away” (31). The sign of the ethical component here is Felicite’s “fainting away”––i.e., a loss of agency. Empathy, however,––“feeling into” —connotes a more autonomous, more strenuous ethical enterprise than sympathy—“an accord of feeling”—and a more determined, volitional denouncement of its counterpart, apathy (a “lack of feeling”). As is

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grammatically inherent, sympathy can be elicited, empathy cannot;15 a “sympathetic character”, in art or life, can mean either one who attracts or one who dispenses sympathy; an “empathetic character”, however, could only refer to the one exercising the capacity to empathize. And we must make a decision to project our empathy this way or that; into President George Bush or Osama Bin Laden or our family or the homeless man by the town hall. Worringer and Woolf have alerted us to such problematic aspects of the ethics of empathy, and resist the claim that either art or literature should be measured (or privileged) through its facilitation of the capacity to empathize. The enterprise of empathy, whatever its results, is always preceded either by an either ideologically or circumstantially determined decision about whom, or what, and when. We should—ethically— be careful then in assuming empathy to be a neutrally ethical act in itself. For this reason, perhaps, it is the “unprofitable excursions” that carry the most ethical value.

References Beck, Ulrich. The Cosmopolitan Vision. London: Polity Press, 2006. Bradbury, Malcolm, and James McFarlane. Modernism 1890-1930. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. Carey, John. The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939. London: Faber & Faber, 1992. —: Pure Pleasure. A Guide to the Twentieth Century’s Most Enjoyable Books. London: Faber & Faber, 2001. —: What Good Are the Arts? London: Faber & Faber, 2005. Cioran, Emile Michel. Précis de Décomposition. Paris: Gallimard, 1949. Cooke, Simon. “Ethnographic Shows this year.” The Art Newspaper Year Ahead Magazine 2004. 89-90. Covey, Stephen. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989. Dean, Carolyn J. The Fragility of Empathy After the Holocaust. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004. Eisenberg, Nancy, and Janet Strayer, eds. Empathy and Its Development. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. Flaubert, Gustave. Three Tales. 1877. Trans. Robert Baldrick. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967. _____________ 15

In this, empathy in ethical terms differs from the sense in which it is used in neuroscience and physiology in reference to motor-neurone reflexes.

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Frank, Joseph. “Spatial Form in Modern Literature.” 1945. The Idea of Spatial Form. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1991. 4-66. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Trans. David McLintock. London: Penguin Classics, 2001. Goleman, Daniel. Emotional Intelligence. New York: Bantam, 1995. 96-110. Hoffman, Martin L. Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Ickes, William John. Everyday Mind Reading: Understanding What Other People Think and Feel. Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2003. Kalliopuska, Mirja. Empathy: The Way to Humanity. Edinburgh: Pentland Press, 1992. Katz, Robert Langdon. Empathy: Its Nature and Uses. London: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963. Keats, John. “Letter to George and Thomas Keats, Sunday 21 Dec. 1817.” The Letters of John Keats. Ed. Maurice Buxton Forman. 4th ed. London: Oxford UP, 1960. 69-72. Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Lasko, Peter. The Expressionist Roots of Modernism. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003. Lee, Hermione. “Introduction.” On Being Ill. By Virginia Woolf. 1926. Ashfield: Paris Press, 2002. xi-xxxiv. Lee, Vernon, and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson. Beauty & Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics. London: John Lane, 1912. Lipps, Theodor. “Einfuhlung, innere Nachahmung, und Organempfindungen.” Archiv für die gesamte Psychologie 2 (1903): 185-204. Luquet, Wade. Short-Term Couples Therapy: The Imago Model in Action. New York: Routledge, 2007. Macfarlane, James. “The Mind of Modernism.” Modernism 1890-1930. Eds. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. 71-93. McEwan, Ian. “Only Love and Then Oblivion. Love Was All They Had to Set against Their Murderers.” The Guardian 15 September 2001. http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/politicsphilosophyandsociety/story/0,,555258,00.html (11 Nov. 2007). Morrison, Karl F. “I Am You”: The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology and Art. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988. Nafasi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran. New York: Random House, 2003. Norton, David L. Imagination, Understanding, and the Virtue of Liberality. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996. Nussbaum, Martha C. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.

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—: Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990. —: Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of the Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. See especially: “Tragic Predicaments.” 297-353; and “Empathy and Compassion.” 327-335. Palmer, Frank. Literature and Moral Understanding: A Philosophical Essay on Ethics, Aesthetics, Education and Culture. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Sebald, Winfried Georg. On the Natural History of Destruction. Trans. Anthea Bell. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “A Defence of Poetry.” The Major Works. Eds. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003. 674-701. Shuman, Amy. Other People’s Stories: Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy. Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 2005. Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” 1903. Modernism. Ed. Michael H. Whitworth. Malden: Blackwell, 2007. 182-189. Simpson, J.A., and E.S.C. Weiner (prep. by). The Oxford English Dictionary. Vol V. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001. Skolnick, Joan, Nancy Dulberg and Theo Maestre. Through Other Eyes: Developing Empathy and Multicultural Perspectives in the Social Studies. Ed. Sean Stokes. Toronto: Pippin, 2004. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin, 2003. —: At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches. Eds. Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007. Stern, J.P. “The Theme of Consciousness: Thomas Mann.” Modernism 1890-1930. Eds. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. 416-429. Stueber, Karsten R. Rediscovering Empathy: Agency, Folk Psychology and the Human Sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2006. Titchener, E. Experimental Psychology of the Thought Processes. New York: Macmillan, 1909. Welleck, R. Discriminations: Further Concepts of Criticism. New Haven: Yale UP, 1970. West, Patrick. Conspicuous Compassion: Why Sometimes It Really Is Cruel to Be Kind. London: Civitas, Institute for the Study of Civil Society, 2004. Wispé, Lauren. “History of the Concept of Empathy.” Empathy and Its Development. Eds. Nancy Eisenberg and Janet Strayer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. 17-37. Woolf, Virginia. On Being Ill. 1926. Ashfield, MA.: Paris Press, 2002. —: The Complete Shorter Fiction. London: Harcourt, 1989.

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—: To the Lighthouse.1927. London: Vintage, 2004. Worringer, Wilhelm. Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style. Trans. Michael Bullock. Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1997.

HUBERT ZAPF (AUGSBURG)

Narrative, Ethics, and Postmodern Art in Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved 1. The Return of Ethics in Literature and Literary Studies The return to ethics in a period of literary and cultural history which, for want of a better term, can be vaguely labeled as the period “after postmodernism,” is connected with a more general shift from a self-referential to a more pragmatic conception of cultural signification processes.1 This shift involves a new attention to the relationship of texts to concrete, biographically embedded subjects and to the wider context of the intersubjective life-world. Concurrent with this change in the literary scene itself, “life” is becoming a new focus and key concept of literary and textual studies.2 However, this shift from text to life cannot and does not happen in an unbroken, unmediated way but involves the complex mediation of cultural and aesthetic signifiers, which are not only indispensable for interpreting but instrumental in constituting and shaping our experience. In this tension between a postmodern epistemology and the pressures and imperatives of a highly personalized and politicized life-world, many recent novels seek to explore new forms of narration in which neither pure self-referentiality nor referential certainties are the focus and productive principle of texts, but a constant and complex mediation between signifier and signified, subject and experience, text and life, aesthetics and ethics. In recent American literature, novels like Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000), Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex (2002), or Edward P. Jones’s The Known World (2003) are examples of this tendency. One particularly instructive case is, as I want to argue in this paper, Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved (2003). It is a novel in which the tension between life and art, ethics and postmodernism becomes itself the focus of narrative attention. It specifically explores the relationship between narrative and ethics in the horizon of postmodern art, as represented by the New York art scene of the later twentieth century. _____________ 1 2

For the dialogue between postmodernism and ethics, which has emerged towards the end of the twentieth century, see for example Parker, and Hoffmann and Hornung. See, for example, Ette. See also Zapf.

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The new focus on ethical questions in literary texts coincides with a new emphasis on texts in contemporary discussions of ethics. There have been significant shifts within recent ethical theory, which has challenged and transformed the universalist, subject-centered, and exclusionary intellectual bias of traditional ethics. Instead of unified systems of knowledge and belief, plurality, diversity, and heterogeneity have been foregrounded as new ethical orientations.3 Rather than hierarchy, stable systems of reference, and monocultural homogeneity, dehierarchization, process, crosscultural openness and dialogicity seem to be the new ethical values. An example is Jean-François Lyotard’s critique of totalizing assumptions and coercive grand narratives, a critique which aims at discursively empowering the concrete, manifold forms of human life that are overshadowed or even silenced by those dominant grand narratives, and that are brought out by what he calls the discourse of the text and, indeed, of literature.4 Likewise, Foucault in his later works rediscovered the realm of ethics as a counterpole to the exclusionary practices of dominant discourses, and interpreted ethics as radical solidarity with the marginalized, and as an intense existential revaluation of “self-fashioning” and bodily experience, including the historical psychosomatic pathologies of the civilized body, versus the predominance of rational, logocentric practices. Even earlier and immensely influential, ethics as discourse of alterity was radicalized into an open, dialogic process by cultural theorists like Mikhail Bakhtin and philosophers such as Emmanuel Levinas, for whom the obligation towards the Other becomes the highest possible value, which manifests itself no longer in a universalist ethic but only in moments of concrete face-to-face-encounter with the Other. The awareness and recognition of the alterity of the Other can be seen as an essential characteristic of the recent discourse of ethics, and narrative seems to be a form in which this discourse can find a specifically instructive, because complex, medium of (self-)exploration.5 _____________ 3

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See, for example, Robert Inglehart, who interprets the shift from modernism to postmodernism, somewhat schematically, as a shift from materialist to postmaterialist values, “[w]hich emphasize human autonomy and diversity instead of the hierarchy and conformity that are central to modernity” (27). In Lyotard’s skepticism towards systemic conceptions, the ethical seems to merge with an ecology of the culturally repressed: “‘ecology’ means the discourse of the secluded, of the thing that has not become public, that has not become communicational, that has not become systemic, and that can never become any of these things. This presupposes that there is a relation of language with the logos, which is not centered on optimal performance and which is not obsessed by it, but which is preoccupied […] with listening to and seeking for what is secluded, oikeion. This discourse is called ‘literature’, ‘art’, or ‘writing’ in general.” See Lyotard, “Ecology as Discourse of the Secluded” 135-139. For an illuminating, well-informed and highly original discussion of these recent trends towards an ethics of literature, see Mayer 5-20; see also Platen.

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As theorists such as J. Hillis Miller, Paul Ricoeur, or Martha Nussbaum have pointed out in their different ways, ethical issues seem to require the form of narrative, because the ethical is a category which resists abstract systematization and instead needs concrete exemplification of lived experience in the form of stories which allow the imaginative transcendence of the individual self towards other selves.6 Ethics in this sense is not the same as morality, on the contrary, it involves precisely a critique of moral systems as far as they imply fixed, conventionalized and impersonal rules of thought and behavior. On the other hand, and for this very reason, an ethics of literature also involves a resistance to unbroken, linear, moralistic story-telling which would subsume the other under one’s own categories, and instead requires a “new ethical sense”(J. Butler), an awareness of irreducible difference, complexity, and alterity.7 In a radical, deconstructive ethics of reading, as Hillis Miller has proposed it, the resistance of language to generalizing moral concepts would ultimately imply that the text is brought to the point of unreadability, the recognition of the ultimate impossibility of understanding the other, one’s self, and, indeed, the meaning of the text.8 Nonetheless, ethics does seem to necessitate some kind of transindividual and intersubjective perspective, a move beyond the self-referential aporias of language towards an involvement of texts in questions of “life”—even and especially in the depragmatized sphere of aesthetics and literary studies. If one tries to survey these recent discussions of ethics and literature, the following points have found special attention: (1) the ways in which the narrative mode is necessary to provide a medium for the concrete exemplification of ethical issues which cannot adequately be explored on a merely systematic-theoretical level; (2) the ways in which narrative literature, as a form of knowledge which is always mediated through personal perspectives, reflects the indissoluble connection between ethics and the human subject, a subject however not understood as a mere cognitive ego but a concrete, bodily self implicated in multiple interrelationships; (3) the ways in which the imaginative staging of other lives in fictional texts provides a forum for the enactment of the dialogical interdependence between self and other, and beyond that of the irreducible difference and alterity of the other which is central to ethics, and (4), the ways in which literature and art are not merely illustrations of moral ideologies but are symbolic representations of complex life processes, whose ethical force _____________ 6 7 8

See Miller; Nussbaum; Ricoeur. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself. See Miller.

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consists precisely in their resistance to easy interpretation and appropriation. It seems to me that Hustvedt’s novel is set very much in the context of such questions, operating at the interface of various contemporary discourses which it fuses into a complex and highly self-reflexive narrative process characterized by the double dynamics of connectivity and alterity, of dialogicity and difference, of familiarity and strangeness. In analogy to the four points just mentioned, I will therefore proceed in my paper in the following way: (1) I will look at the construction of the plot of What I Loved in some detail, since the plot, in its intricate ramifications and interconnections, provides the fictional groundwork for the conflictory dynamics of the tensions between theory and practice, reflection and action, intellect and passion, mind and body, self and other, familiarity and strangeness that the text enacts; (2) I will examine the narrative perspective as a form through which the question of knowledge is inherently connected in the novel with the question of love, and with the problems of subjective identity, memory, and intersubjective communication; (3) I will discuss the characters and their interrelationships with a view to the ways in which the characters are conceived not as individualistic autonomous selves but as actors in a dynamical network of relationships, in complex energy fields of differences and affinities which make them appear indissolubly interdependent with their alter egos; (4) I will examine the role of art itself as an explicit intermedial topic of the novel, and the ways in which the interconnection of art with life and with questions of ethics is presented in the postmodern New York art scene which illustrates a broad spectrum of contemporary art between the ideological and the ethical, between commercialization and authenticity. 2. The Plot of What I Loved: Liminal Experiences in a World beyond Good and Evil The novel is told in retrospect by seventy-year-old art critic Leo Hertzberg, who is gradually losing his eyesight. Against the background of a milieu of artists and intellectuals, Hertzberg is writing down his memories of his friendship with artist Bill Wechsler, who has died some years before. The narrative tone and style is strongly influenced by the individual voice of the first-person narrator, which is tinged with the melancholy of loss and, in lengthy essayistic and reflective passages, mirrors the style of the art expert; however, it is enriched with a multitude of other voices in remembered scenes and dialogues, which lends the narrative a dynamic of its own beyond the limits of an individual consciousness.

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The book is divided into three parts, which are narrated in a roughly chronological order, but often associative cuts are worked in or the sequence is interrupted by flashbacks. The narrated time stretches from the beginning of Leo’s friendship with Wechsler in 1975 to the narrative present, the year 2000, basically covering the last quarter of the twentieth century. The first part relates how Leo, a Professor of Art History at Columbia University, buys one of Wechsler’s paintings that he has seen in an exhibition and soon becomes his friend—a friendship that is to have a profound effect on his life. Like his wife Erica, a lecturer in English literature, Leo is of German-Jewish origin; he was born in Berlin in 1930 and came to America as a five-year-old with his parents, fleeing from the Nazis while their relatives that had stayed in Germany died in concentration camps. Leo’s friendship with Bill and his encounter with Bill’s art help to lay bare these depths of early-childhood memories as well as Leo’s feelings towards his wife with an intensity he has never experienced before. Moreover, these emotions are also strangely connected with Bill’s first wife Lucille, a poet, and—later on—with Bill’s second wife Violet, a doctoral candidate in psychology who served as a model for the first painting titled Self-Portrait that Leo bought from Bill. Bill and Lucille move into the upper floor of the house in which Leo and Erica live, and not long after the Hertzbergs’ son Matt is born, they also have a son named Mark. Two years later Bill and Lucille split up, and shortly afterwards, Bill marries Violet. Taking little Mark with her, Lucille moves to Houston, Texas, where she takes up a position as a lecturer in creative writing. Only a few weeks later, however, when she realizes she has not enough time for her son, she sends him back to New York, where in the meantime Violet has taken her place and moved in with Bill. The Hertzbergs and Bill’s new family start to live in a kind of symbiosis, which is intensified by Leo’s daily visits to Bill’s studio and by holidays they spend together in Vermont. Matt and Mark grow up like brothers, even though below the surface Mark’s absent mother remains an unconscious presence undermining the apparent harmony of the new family relations. The second part begins with a shock for the reader. Matt, Leo’s and Erica’s son, drowns on a canoe ride while he is on a summer camp vacation with Mark. Matt’s death is followed by his parents’ long mourning process, which affects them in different ways and ends with their insuperable alienation. Erica accepts an offer from Berkeley and moves to California; their marriage is now limited to letters, rare phone calls and a twoweek holiday they take together once a year. Leo, who feels as if paralyzed for a long time, retreats even more into his work and his closed circle of relationships with Bill, Violet and Mark. While Bill is often out working in

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his studio, Leo, increasingly lonely, begins to focus his erotic daydreams on Violet. At the same time Mark takes the role of surrogate son to Leo after the death of Matt, to whom in his turn Bill had taken a special liking as if to his own son, and whom he had fostered when he showed first signs of an artistic talent. Leo is as devoted to Mark as he is to Violet, who is trying to replace Mark’s absent mother. However, Mark is increasingly becoming a problem for everybody involved. He turns out to be a notorious liar, plays truant, gets involved in the drug scene. But with breathtaking impudence he is able to manipulate the adults again and again with his charm and to act the part of the innocent boy in spite of all evidence to the contrary. He comes under the influence of the New York performance artist Teddy Giles, whose commercially oriented action art, focused on sensational effects and visual orgies of violence, is an extreme counterpole to Bill’s personally authentic, decidedly non-commercial conception of art. The criminal energy Mark is developing, which among other things drives him to steal $ 7,000 from Leo, is related to Giles’s influence and thus, in Bill’s view, is also directed against himself as Mark’s father. Bill, who loves his prodigal son in whom he has placed high hopes, is crushed by this experience and dies of a heart attack in his studio even while he is grappling with this problem of loss and alienation in a new project, a video project on childhood and adolescence entitled Icarus. In the third part of the novel the unpredictable behavior of Mark, who seems strangely unaffected by his father’s death, continues with additional force and becomes even more sinister. He claims to work in various jobs while he is actually drawn deeper and deeper into the excesses of the New York underground art scene that Giles represents. Through Mark, Violet and Leo get mixed up in an obscure game that threatens to become dead earnest. Giles destroys one of Bill’s paintings he had bought, a portrait of Mark, and exhibits the deformed result as a piece of his own action art. Then he disappears with Mark, making Leo, who believes Mark’s life in peril, crisscross the US, trailing them from airport to airport in a wild chase. During this trip, Giles and Mark intentionally leave a trail of clues but at the same time cover them up. They appear in varied disguises and sexes, sometimes as a homosexual couple, sometimes as a heterosexual one, sometimes even as father and son. A surreal film-like scenario unfolds that finally leads to the showdown in the Opryland Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee, that is to say in one of the commercial centers of American popular culture. Leo, however, has overstrained himself in the chase. When he finally discovers the two of them in the labyrinthine, impenetrable hotel, he is not up to the confrontation, feeling physically paralyzed. As a consequence, he is helplessly at the mercy of Giles, who humiliates him and

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threatens him with disrespectful intimacy. Mark watches indifferently as Giles, despite his smart and elegant appearance, seizes Leo’s head with both hands and pushes it against the wall with a brutal jerk in a deserted corridor of the hotel. Only when hotel guests happen to come by, Leo, shattered, manages to escape into his room. One more time he believes Mark, who promises to come home, but the next morning Mark once again does not show up at the agreed place, so Leo returns to New York without him. Some time afterwards, Giles is put on trial for homicide and accused of having killed one of his fans, a young boy, in his “ultimate work of art,” a brutal ritual murder. Indeed the boy’s dismembered body is found soon, and Mark is suspected as an accomplice, but in the end he is exonerated by a witness. Giles, who has become rather famous because of his scandalous reputation in the New York art scene, is convicted and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Mark disappears from Leo’s life. Violet, whom Leo has been worshipping for a long time but who never returned his love, moves to Paris, the center of her cultural-historical research. Leo stays in New York alone and, by now half blind, writes the novel. Only Lazlo Finkelman, a younger friend who has followed the fate of the two families with unobtrusive sympathy, drops by regularly and, when Leo is taking a break from writing, reads to him from a novel: Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. What the preceding reconstruction of the plot demonstrates is a highly contradictory dynamics of interactions, events, and relationships, which stages a multiplicity of human experiences in ways which foreground the tensions between art and life, past and present, trauma and memory, love and violence, empathy and indifference, thus addressing fundamental ethical questions of human value and dignity in a postmodern world torn between humanizing and dehumanizing forces. It is a series of liminal experiences which confront the characters—and the reader —with intense and often agonizing borderline situations, double-binds and ambiguities which, instead of moralizing certainties, characterize the ethical experience. In the course of the book, the narrator’s consciousness and mentality encounter a world beyond good and evil, a confusing and threateningly uncontrollable contemporary world which, like the traumatic memories of the past, resist any coherent rational or ethical interpretation. 3. Narrative Perspective: Love’s Knowledge and the Ethics of Answerability The narrative perspective in What I Loved cannot be separated from the character of Leo Hertzberg, who determines the selection, evaluation and

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presentation of events. The first-person narration, which is maintained throughout the novel, establishes a fundamental perspectivism that applies to all insights imparted in the novel, relating the truth-claims of all statements to the concrete mental, psychic and physical life situation of the individual speaker. The imagery of blindness and insight that characterizes the frame situation of writing the novel is significant in this context: Leo’s vision becomes more and more limited; only dimly does he perceive the outlines of the reality around him. My eyes started to go on me the following year. I thought that the haze in my vision was caused by strain from my work or maybe cataracts. When the ophthalmologist told me there was nothing to be done, because the form of macular degeneration I had was of the dry rather than the wet sort, I nodded, thanked him, and stood up to leave. He must have found my response perverse, because he frowned at me. I told him I had been lucky with my health so far, and I wasn’t surprised by illnesses that had no cure. He said that was un-American, and I agreed. Over the years the haze turned into fog, and then into the thick clouds that block my vision now. I’ve always been able to see the periphery of things, which allows me to walk without a cane, and I can still negotiate my way on the subway. (What I Loved 356)

The narrator’s clouded vision is described very concretely here with all its physical symptoms, as are his realistic way of dealing with his illness and his acceptance of the limits of human ability, which stands in contrast to the optimism of American society. It seems, however, that this external limitation of his vision allows him to see all the more sharply with his inner eye: Leo is capable of visualizing the past in minute detail. There is an indissoluble link between blindness and insight, between the possibility of knowing and its limitations, which is inherent in his perspective. Thus the fact that he is writing down his memories on his old Olympia typewriter is not an indication of his Olympian omniscience but a result of the fact that he is more familiar with the keys of this typewriter, which he can hardly make out, than with the keyboard of his PC. Leo himself interprets the physical impairing of his vision in a generalizing, epistemological way, referring to a basic problem of perceiving the world and one’s self. The difficulty of seeing clearly haunted me long before my eyes went bad, in life as well as in art. It’s a problem of the viewer’s perspective—as Matt pointed out that night in his room when he noted that when we look at people and things, we’re missing from our own picture. The spectator is the true vanishing point, the pinprick in the canvas, the zero. […] Over the years, Bill had become a moving reference to me, a person I had always kept in view. At the same time, he had often eluded me. Because I knew so much about him, because I have been so close to him, I couldn’t bring the various fragments of my experience with him into a single coherent image. The truth was mobile and contradictory, and I was willing to live with that. (255)

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Just as Bill creating his art, Leo, writing down his memories, is tracking down a truth that keeps escaping him. The observer himself is absent in the image he designs; he is a blind spot in the mediated world that, on the other hand, only he himself can create in its unmistakable perspectivism. This perspectivism does not imply an epistemological solipsism that sees the external world as a mere construct of the perceiving and understanding self; it rather emphasizes how the subject position involves a partial, limited and even distorted view of the world and one’s self. Nor is the ineluctable perspectivism of knowledge, memory and narration solely associated with lack, negation, and failure, but also with special abilities of perception and understanding. In Judith Butler’s concept of a “new ethical sense” which goes beyond former illusory models of unbroken self-identity, our “partial blindness to ourselves” means partial failure of self-knowledge, but also that “we fail in ways which are characteristic for ourselves” (Butler, Kritik der ethischen Gewalt, qtd. in Mayer 10). In Leo’s case these qualities are his highly developed intellectual as well as emotional skills. As an art critic, he has developed a remarkable ability to interpret works of art, but also visual phenomena in general, in a subtle, differentiated way. His book A History of Seeing in Western Paintings underlines that he has intensely studied and internalized the rich cultural-historical repertoire of seeing and perspectivism. On the basis of this competence, he not only takes an active interest in Bill Wechsler’s productions which reveals itself in critical comments and publications on Bill’s art but also observes people and life around him with eyes sharpened by his profession. Besides, he has a vast knowledge of world literature which, in different ways, influences his own writing style, e.g., the psychological novels of Henry James, about whom Leo’s wife Erica is writing a book, or the reflective-essayistic novels of Robert Musil, whose Man Without Qualities is read to him when he takes a break from writing his own novel. This openness of the narrator’s consciousness for all sorts of influences transforms the apparent mono-perspective of Leo Hertzberg into an internal polyphony of a narrative that manifests itself in the incorporation of various forms of art and literature, ranging from high to popular literature, from classics to fairy tales, from letters to poems, and not least including Wechsler’s fictitious works of art. This multivoiced texture creates a level of dialogicity which is explicitly articulated in the numerous dialogues between the characters, and which actively contributes to the course of events and of the narration beyond the narrator’s conscious control. Apart from his intellectual ability, the narrator also has an extraordinary emotional intelligence, which allows him to put himself into other people’s place almost to the point of self-effacement. Yet this emotional

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ability is itself highly ambivalent. On the one hand, it engenders an intersubjective process of understanding in which the individual characters become part of a larger cultural pattern, a kind of psychogram of the postmodern New York art scene and, more generally, of American culture in the closing years of the twentieth century. On the other hand, however, the emotions enabling this process of understanding can never be completely controlled by the narrator and display both their productivity and their compulsiveness independently from his conscious self. This is illustrated in the novel’s own genesis: Leo, who after Bill’s death has been writing an art-historical book about Bill’s works, suddenly abandons this project one day and starts writing the novel instead. The turning point, which is also the initial scene of Leo’s narrative, is the moment when he accidentally discovers in Bill’s estate the love letters Violet once wrote to Bill, which so impressed Bill that he left his wife immediately afterwards. The letters confront Leo anew with Violet and Bill’s passionate love for each other and seem to kindle his own—hopeless—passion for Violet all over again. It is these love letters that electrify the ageing art professor, transporting him into a state of inspired excitement which makes him drop everything else and start writing the novel instead. The fascination of the Eros emanating from Violet’s letters is caught in Bill’s painting of Violet that, ever since Leo has bought it, has hung in his room as the object of his desire and attention, and that the narrator describes in detail in the scene immediately following the discovery of the letters. Violet’s letters and Bill’s painting of her together form the starting point of the novel’s process, revealing a complex interpersonal network of relationships and a powerful emotional force inspiring the narrator and connecting him with the characters not merely on a conscious, but on an unconscious, quasi-magical level. The title, What I Loved, underlines this connection between love and knowledge in the novel as a whole, in which Leo examines his whole life in the light of everything and everyone he loved, above all Violet and Bill. The novel’s narrative perspective thus seems to resonate with affinities to theories such as Martha Nussbaum’s concept of literature as “love’s knowledge,” a mode of knowing which transcends the merely rational and philosophical towards emotional and experiential modes (see Nussbaum). What this means is that the figure of the narrator, however distinct a personality he may be, cannot be understood as an isolated individual but only in interpersonal interrelatedness. This is true of the narrative present as well as of the life history of Leo, which reaches back to his childhood in Berlin. Sometimes fragmentary episodes from that time appear to him in waking dreams, for example the now empty apartment in Mommsenstraße, where he lived with his parents until the age of five, and which he re-

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members minutely. Also, he often looks at the photographs of his relatives who were murdered in concentration camps, which he keeps in his collection of personal keepsakes. I have the formal wedding portrait of my Uncle David and Aunt Marta, and a picture of the twins in short wool coats with ribbons in their hair. Beneath each girl in the white border of the photo, Marta wrote their names, to avoid confusion—Anna on the left, Ruth on the right. The black-and-white figures of the photographs have had to stand in place of my memory, and yet I have always felt that their unmarked graves became a part of me. What was unwritten then is inscribed into what I call myself. The longer I live the more convinced I am that when I say ‘I’, I am really saying ‘we’. (What I Loved 22-23)

If Leo’s story-telling is triggered by the fascination of the Eros emanating from Violet, it is thus equally strongly motivated by the traumatizing experience and presence of death, which is symptomatic of the catastrophes of the twentieth century, and is also part of the history of his extended family and of his recent past with the death of his son Matt. All these counteracting forces have become a part of his personality; they are the substance and condition of his narrative, through which he is trying to retrieve the value and possibility of life from the ethical wasteland of modern civilization. This attempt is authenticated again and again by the fact that his narrative turns into an existential liminal experience, an exposure to his own fears of annihilation. In a drawer, Leo has collected keepsakes through which he symbolically preserves the memory of the past and which he rearranges in ever changing ways. Just like the narrative itself, this mobile collection of personal memorabilia contains in itself a double, negative and positive energy, a simultaneous denial and affirmation of meaning. [W]hen I play my game of mobile objects, I’m often tempted to move the photographs of my aunt, uncle, grandparents, and the twins near the knife and the fragment of the box. Then the game flirts with terror. It moves me so close to the edge that I have a sensation of falling, as if I had hurled myself off the edge of a building. I plummet downward, and in the speed of the fall I lose myself in something formless but deafening. It’s like entering a scream—being a scream. And then I withdraw, backing away from the edge like a phobic. I make a different arrangement. Talismans, icons, incantations—these fragments are my frail shields of meaning. The game’s moves must be rational, I force myself to make a coherent argument for every grouping, but at the bottom the game is magic. I’m its necromancer calling on the spirits of the dead, the missing, the imaginary. Like O painting a loaf of beef because he’s hungry, I invoke ghosts that can’t satisfy me. But the invocation has a power all its own. The objects become muses of memory. (364-365)

Leo’s story is a post-traumatic narrative driven by an ethics of answerability. It is a search for orientation and meaning which brings about extreme fragility, experience of loss, and self-exposure, but also a transformative

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potential which springs from the magical power of narrative as a form of “love’s knowledge” (Nussbaum). 4. The Characters: Dialogic Selves and Radical Alterity If we now turn to the characters in What I Loved, we encounter a similarly open and plural conception: while each of them gains a distinct and unique individuality, this individuality is shaped and conditioned by their plural interrelationships. The German family name of Bill Wechsler around whom the events and emotions revolve indicates that this everchanging, dynamic and relational concept of personality is composed into the symbolic center of the text’s creative energies itself which Bill represents. The relationship between the two male protagonists Leo and Bill is characterized by a network of contrasts and affinities which makes them appear both as distinct personalities and as alter egos. From the beginning Bill, eleven years younger, is a contrasting character to Leo: the established art critic stands against the artist at the beginning of his career, setting out for new aesthetic projects; the intellectual, reflective man against the intuitively productive, creative man; the vita contemplativa against the vita activa; theory against practice; highly developed consciousness against the dream scenarios of the unconscious; or, on another level, the institution of writing and textuality itself against the creative life energies it tries to capture. Bill is described as a powerful physical presence, which becomes manifest in his enormous productivity and in the concrete, handicraft character of his ever new paintings and installations and which contributes a great deal to the strong effect he has on others, particularly on Violet and the narrator. Unlike the more reserved, conciliatory Leo, Bill is radical to the point of extreme self-contradiction; he has a strict moral code but violates it when he falls in love with Violet and leaves his wife for her, and he suffers from this contradiction to the extent of self-destruction. Uncompromising, he follows the expeditions of his art into the unconscious, into the depth of the existential problems he and the others are beset with. He still hopes for the redemptive power of the love he has found in Violet, which, however, cannot save him from the destructive vortex in which he is caught in the end. But on another level, there are affinities between the two contrasting characters. On the one hand, Bill is by no means merely the unconsciously creating artist. He is perfectly conscious of the position of his works in history and the present, which he continuously discusses with Leo. On the other hand, Leo, as we have seen, keeps descending from the reflective

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level of his observer position into the sphere of dreams and nightmares of the unconscious, of which the substance of Bill’s work is made. And in the course of their relationship the two friends symmetrically assume the other’s position: as Bill is becoming a second father to Leo’s son Matt, Leo becomes a second father to Bill’s son Mark; as the magic of Violet’s erotic charisma is becoming a source of artistic inspiration for Bill, it is also becoming a source of artistic inspiration for Leo—for Bill, in the medium of painting, for Leo, in writing, until finally, Leo himself becomes an artist on the basis of his complex interpretation of Bill’s life and work. He translates Bill’s legacy, so to speak, from visual art into language. Their relationship is thus designed in terms of an intermedial transformation, of a metamorphosis from the medium of the image to the medium of the text. Again the strong interaction of life and art becomes clear: Leo and Bill’s intense personal relationship is itself an important form of knowledge: “Friendship is a powerful form of intelligence,” as the narrator states. At the same time, this form of communicative intelligence is a source of artistic productivity for the two friends and alter egos. Between the female main characters, too, there are sharp contrasts as well as deeper affinities and interactions. Violet Bloom, Bill’s former model and second wife, at first sight appears as the complete opposite of Lucille, Bill’s first wife. In contrast to the latter’s self-absorption, intellectual distance and coldness, Violet embodies affection, warmth and vital energy. In the polar tension of Eros and Thanatos that shapes the novel, Violet as a force of strong physical-emotional attraction clearly represents the former pole, while Lucille embodies a repressive, negative energy associated with the pole of Thanatos. She behaves in a strangely indifferent way toward Mark, even when he is caught deeper and deeper in his crisis, and her influence on Bill and Leo is rather destructive as well. In the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel, which plays an important part in the novel and is taken up in Bill’s works, Lucille’s seems to be the role of the absent, evil mother who reappears in the forest in the monstrous form of the witch and whose cannibalistic egocentrism poisons the relationships of others. But again, the binary opposition between her and Violet is also undermined. Violet changes in the course of the novel, and becomes Mark’s surrogate mother as Leo becomes his surrogate father, thus getting into highly ambivalent emotional situations that oscillate between love and hate, just as Mark for his part manifests in his behavior towards Violet the alternating attraction and rejection in the relationship with his real mother Lucille. Both women have in common not only the marriage with Bill, but also the friendship with Leo, who embarks on a short but oddly aggressive sexual adventure with Lucille, while he feels a much deeper, enduring emotional closeness to Violet.

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Erica, Leo’s wife, is somewhere between these poles: on the one hand, she is more spontaneous, more open, and closer to the pole of Eros than Lucille, especially before her son Matt dies; but on the other hand, she is more reserved, tense, and melancholy than Violet, which derives, among other things, from her occupation with the Holocaust. At first she is a friend of Lucille’s, later on she befriends Violet, but she never reaches a lasting friendship of the sort Leo has with Bill. Despite all their differences, however, the three women have something important in common: they are exceptionally productive intellectuals—Violet as a psychologist, Erica as a literary scholar, and Lucille as a poet. All three of them, in different ways, creatively confront the complex problematic situations in which they find themselves and deal with them as culturally relevant phenomena. But it is clear that in the eyes of the narrator, Violet has the key role; unlike the other women, who stay in the background for long stretches, she is present in the novel from beginning to end and sometimes gets to be the narrator’s mouthpiece. Not only is she the starting point of the erotic chain reaction that holds Bill and, later on, Leo spellbound, she also puts insights into words which come to be programmatic for the novel: I’ve decided that mixing is a key term. It’s better than suggestion, which is onesided. It explains what people rarely talk about, because we define ourselves as isolated, closed bodies who bump up against each other but stay shut. Descartes was wrong. It isn’t: I think, therefore I am. It’s: I am because you are. That’s Hegel—well, the short version. (What I Loved 91)

The ideology of individualism as a concept of modernity which was especially successful in America, is rejected here in favor of dialogic interdependence. This is by no means a naïve position, as Violet sees the dangers of “mixing” as well: the danger of losing oneself in the other, which has something threatening about it. Violet knows all this from studying the history of cultural pathologies on which she has been working for years, for instance hysterical phenomena of the nineteenth century or the phenomenon of eating disorders in the late twentieth century, which make the boundaries of individuals and bodies unstable and fluid. This partly fascinating, partly alienating interrelationship between persons, and the ineradicable presence of the other in one’s own self, is evident also in the case of Matt and Mark, who are the same age and grow up like brothers. The alliteration and assonance of the initial letters of their names, their common age, and their emotional bonds to both boys’ parents again make them appear, in spite of their differences, as alter egos inseparably linked to one another, just like their fathers. Even after his death, Matt remains a psychological presence in Mark; in fact the two seem to merge into one, contradictory person. Mark be-

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comes a son for both couples, whose emotions concentrate on him more intensely now. The two boys’ opposite characters now find expression more and more clearly within Mark’s personality. The positive energy personified in Matt when he was still alive—his pleasant, always friendly manner and the intellectual and creative interest he showed at an early age—is fused with and absorbed by Mark’s negative energy, which manifests itself in unreliability, deception and his participation in pseudo-artistic, criminal circles. In the double life he leads, he embodies these two sides of the son’s role and increasingly develops the symptoms of a split self. The figure of the beloved son mutates in Mark into an eerie travesty, a psychic black hole that consumes and perverts the emotions directed towards him. The extreme ambiguity of his experience of parental figures—the ambivalence between love and rejection, and between his real and surrogate mothers and fathers,—is transformed into his split existence as a postmodern, juvenile version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. As such he dominates especially the second part of the novel and becomes a challenge for the adults which ultimately they cannot master. The adults try to cope with the challenge of Mark’s resistant personality by developing various explanations. One is a psychological explanation according to which Bill’s divorce from Lucille means an experience of loss and disorientation for little Mark which renders him unable to regain inner stability. Bill himself seems to believe strongly in this version and blames himself the most for Mark’s development, even though the narrator relativizes this and Bill in fact cares for his son very much. Another is a cultural interpretation that considers Mark as the symptom of a postmodern zeitgeist and of a deep crisis of ethical values, which threaten to be consumed by the simulacra of a commercial entertainment culture. Like a guru, Teddy Giles, the sinister action artist and Mephistophelian rival of Wechsler, gathers disoriented adolescents around him and seems to bind them to himself with his combination of attraction and aggression, stylishness and splatter, celebrity cult and cynicism. Mark’s perpetual disguises, pretences and metamorphoses reflect, on a smaller scale, the perpetual transformations of Giles. Giles is himself a Dr. Jekyll of the New York art scene, who, unlike his Victorian precursor, displays his gothic double Mr. Hyde openly in public. Giles’s notion of art is reminiscent of some of the shock artists of the current art scene, and of some deliberately shocking aspects in Wechsler’s fictitious art, too—with the decisive difference that for Giles, the distinction between art and reality has completely disappeared, which in its radical consequence is the very reason for the dramatic loss of ethical orientation. Besides, the difficulties with Mark can also be interpreted on a mythical-archetypal level. One expression of this level is the fairy tale Hansel and

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Gretel, which was Mark’s favorite fairy tale when he was a child and becomes an important reference not only for Bill’s art, but for the whole novel. “Yes, Hansel and Gretel is Mark’s story” (What I Loved 91), Violet observes, referring to the disturbed relationship with his mother and father that the fairy tale implies, the primeval fear of children of being deserted by their parents and left alone in a strange, threatening world. Bill’s installations on Hansel and Gretel consist of a number of wooden boxes of different sizes and show various scenes of the fairy tale—some in cut-out, two-dimensional pictures, others in three-dimensional arrangements that the viewer can walk in. In them, the children’s forlornness, their abandonment in a labyrinthine, impenetrable world whose deceptive simulacra are threatening to devour them, becomes a metaphor for the human being’s general loss of meaning and orientation. The alluring witch house on the one hand and the monstrous, cannibalistic witch on the other hand represent the delusive duplicity of belonging and alienation, attraction and terror which not only characterizes Mark’s experiences with the world of adults, but reflects them back to the adults in his relationship with Giles. In a conversation with Leo towards the end of the novel, Violet wonders why she hates Mark by now and if Mark’s developing into such a problem may also have been caused by ethical contradictions in the grown-ups’ attitudes. She alludes directly to the title of the novel. “But the really terrible question is this: What was it that I loved?” She remembers how once the boisterousness and unruliness of the six-year-old Mark were repressed in favor of an outwardly “good” behavior, with which he tried to purchase the adults’ “love.” After a visit to his mother, he comes back completely changed: By the time he came back to New York, the furious little wild man had disappeared for good. It was like somebody had cast a spell on him and turned him into a docile, agreeable replica of himself. But that was the thing I learned to love—that automaton. (352)

The adults’ love for the well-functioning, puppet-like replica of themselves into which Mark has turned betrays a lack of genuine affection. It excludes the real Mark, who only reappears in the distorted picture in which the suppressed part of his ego later returns with a power uncontrollable even by himself. The basic question asked in the title of the novel, What I Loved, contains as an answer the realization of the radical ambiguity and paradoxicality of relationships, the possibility of a fundamental deception resulting from the perception of the other not as such and on his or her own terms, but only as a part of one’s own projections. Thus on the one hand, the different levels of interpretation of the phenomenon of Mark are developed and related to each other in a highly differentiated way, but on the other hand it becomes clear that ultimately they are unsatisfactory.

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The mysteriousness and final unavailability of a human being to all categories of explanation remain vivid in the case of Mark, and the acknowledgement of this fact may be the only adequate ethical gesture left in the end, after all the failed attempts at his social domestication. If the ethics of answerability which the narrator shares with Bill and Violet involves a critique of violence as a symptom of the loss of values in an amoral commercialized culture, it is radicalized here to a point which could be described with Judith Butler as a critique of ethical violence itself: the challenge of recognizing an other, not on the terms of one’s own definitions and expectations, but in the irreducible strangeness of his or her alterity.9 5. Ethics and Aesthetics: The Relationship of Art to Life What I Loved is to a great extent a novel about art, about its past and present forms, and particularly about its relation to life and the human culture that produces, consumes, and recycles it. The multiple processes and products of creative energy that are thematized in the novel form an additional frame of reference which reflects the plural, dialogical aesthetics of What I Loved: Siri Hustvedt imagines a male first-person narrator fascinated by the works of an artist whose self-portrait is the representation of another, a woman, who in turn inspires the narrator to write down his memories. The close interrelation of art and life, self and other is fundamental for the novel and an integral part of its exploration on the boundary-line between ethical and aesthetic issues. In the novel’s cosmos of artistic creativity, art is no longer a self-contained autonomous product but unfolds in multiple aesthetic projects and processes that are as decentralized, fragmentary and yet magically interlinked as the forms of perception and experience of life itself. To interpret art as process and to interrelate it with personal and interpersonal life processes, however, does not—as it does in Teddy Giles’ version—result in its complete dissolution in spectacle, entertainment and commercial interests. The novel does not permit a tension-free correspondence of signifier and signified or a one-to-one translation of art into life, but maintains the difference and specific dynamics of the aesthetic even in the act of existentially and ethically interrelating the two poles. Indeed, the very impulse of art to explore and enhance life transgresses the available cultural discourses towards an imaginative counterdiscourse which articulates a labyrinthine underworld of the unconscious, of emotions, dreams, instincts, myth, and magic which form a significant part of _____________ 9

See Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself.

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the novel’s texture. As the self-reflexive staging of complex life processes, art maintains a culturally indispensable role and function in the novel. In the ekphrastic representations of classical and contemporary artworks, the text distances itself from the pressures of the immediate present and the cult of spectacular newness, and espouses criteria such as complexity, authenticity, and answerability even in the open imaginative space of radical experiments. The works of art of the past, just like those of the present, are not dead museum pieces that should be looked at in an attitude of uncritical consumption, but represent powerful energy-fields that are activated by ever new receptions, capable of producing unexpected existential effects. One example is a scene in which Leo teaches a seminar in art history about a year after the death of his son Matt. He discusses the picture Glass of Water and Coffee Pot by Jean-Baptiste Chardin, which was painted in 1760 and today hangs in the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. We had already discussed several paintings. I began by pointing out how simple the painting was, two objects, three heads of garlic, and the sprig of an herb. I mentioned the light on the pot’s rim and handle, the whiteness of the garlic, and the silver hues of the water. And then I found myself staring down at the glass of water in the picture. I moved very close to it. The strokes were visible. I could see them plainly. A precise quiver of the brush had made light. I swallowed, breathed heavily, and choked. I think it was Maria Livingston who said, ‘Are you all right, Professor Hertzberg?’ I cleared my throat, removed my glasses, and wiped my eyes. ‘The water’, I said in a low voice. ‘The glass of water is very moving to me.’ I looked up and saw the surprised faces of my students. ‘The water is a sign of...’ I paused. ‘The water seems to be a sign of absence.’ I remained silent, but I could feel warm tears running down my cheeks. My students continued to look at me. ‘I believe that’s all for today,’ I told them in a tremulous voice. ‘Go outside and enjoy the weather.’ (What I Loved 147)

The absence which the glass of water signifies for Leo is the absence of his son Matt, for whom Leo used to put a glass of water beside his bed every night before Matt fell asleep. And it is the transformative power of the work of art, the vivid trace of the creative act—the “precise quiver of the brush” on the painting—which produced this time-transcending still life that brings back the repressed memory to his consciousness with the intensity of a shock. “A real glass of water had not once reminded me of my son, but the image of a glass of water rendered 230 years earlier had catapulted me suddenly and irrevocably into the painful awareness that I was still alive” (148). The experience of the painting signifies a turning point which at last enables Leo to begin the process of mourning; it results in a crisis that is extremely painful on the one hand, but on the other hand leads him back into life by breaking up the state of inner numbness and paralysis in which he has been trapped since Matt’s death.

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For months I had lived in a state of self-enforced rigor mortis, interrupted only by the playacting of my work, which didn’t disturb the entombment I had chosen for myself, but a part of me had known that a crack was inevitable. Chardin became the instrument of the break, because the little painting took me by surprise. I hadn’t girded myself for its attack on my senses, and I went to pieces. The truth is, I had avoided resurrection because I must have known that it would be excruciating. (Ibid.)

It is because of its aesthetic defamiliarization and uncontrollable imaginative dynamics that art is successful in triggering cathartic effects that confront people with their deepest, repressed problems and enable them to integrate these problems into their conscious selves. The aesthetic activation of the senses causes emotional turbulences which take Leo out of the paralysis of his trauma and help him regain his will to live. This close interrelation between art and life which is made possible by the imaginative transformation of experience, is true above all of the art of Bill Wechsler, which dominates the novel until he dies and even afterwards continues to affect the other characters. With the narrator’s eye of the empathetic art critic we follow the different stages of Bill’s work, which we are presented as if in a workshop of the imagination in the process of their conception and realization. In his descriptions, Leo gives a very detailed account of Bill’s studio and his various projects, which appear at the same time as an active part and an imaginary reflection of the narrated life processes unfolding in the novel. It should be noted that Bill’s works, which Leo describes for us, are themselves fictitious. Although they take shape before our eyes with great plasticity and in all the details of their subject, colors, forms and materials, they, unlike the works Leo refers to as an art critic such as Chardin’s painting, have no identifiable extratextual referent. Through Leo’s narrative voice, Hustvedt simulates a world of visual imagination, which, nevertheless, exists only in language. This allows the reader to participate in a creative process that explores the theme of the novel in another medium, extending the linguistic sign process to non-linguistic signs and a fictitious intermediality. Thereby, an additional imaginative space is opened up in which the novel’s own conception of art can be reflected in self-reflexive distance and intermedial dialogue. Bill’s art is closely connected to the contemporary art scene, but at the same time it constantly alludes to and symbolically integrates the history of art. It brings together different styles, materials and media in an eclectic yet individual way to form ever new combinations that mirror important artistic developments of the second half of the twentieth century and at the same time refer, like palimpsests, back to earlier stages of art. The movement towards pure abstraction is revoked here; Bill’s art is narrative, plastic and strongly centered on images, and in parts even comes close to

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the naïve products of children’s imagination. There are always recognizable references to life and the world, although they are defamiliarized in dream-like, surreal and nightmarish ways. Bill’s art is open not only to the present and to knowable history but also to the magical dimension of a “dream time” (‘Traumzeit’), as Hans Peter Dürr called it with reference to premodern cultures.10 Modern and archaic elements, innovation and creative regression, play and terror, reality and dream, the conscious and the unconscious, are the characteristic subjects of Bill’s works, which follow their own explorative dynamics yet cannot be separated from the energies of their production and reception. They are always in interaction with the viewer, whose different ways of perceiving and experiencing life they activate. Bill’s œuvre itself is continually in motion; the individual works are part of serial compositions whose motifs are repeated, combined and rearranged in ever new variations. They link the world of art, the sphere of aesthetics, with the world of life, the sphere of ethics, because the constant metamorphoses of his artistic productions are deeply connected and self-reflexively related to the problems of life that the novel’s narrative process unfolds. The serial and ever-changing character of Bill’s art already shows in the phase when he is still focused on painting. The picture that Leo once bought and that has since been hanging in his apartment as the object of ever new contemplation is part of a series of six works dealing with Violet, Bill’s model at the time. They display her in varying shapes, colors, postures, sizes and illuminations, shifting between close-up and distant perspective, increased and reduced body size, erotic pose and grotesque deformation. On one level, the pictures seem to mirror the body issues of humans in modern civilizations—oscillating between obesity and anorexia—with which Violet is dealing in her psychological studies. Bill is particularly interested in the portrayal of skin as the organ of transition between inner and outer world where the conflicts, tensions and energies of the person as a whole become visible. In one of the pictures, (s)he was wearing a ragged flannel nightgown and sitting on the edge of the bed, her thighs casually parted. A pair of red knee socks lay at her feet. When I looked at her legs, I noticed that just below her knees were faint red lines left by the elastic of the socks. (11)

Leo is reminded by this picture of Jan Steen’s painting of a woman at her morning toilet, a picture hanging in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, which Bill indeed had mentioned as a source of inspiration. _____________ 10

See Dürr. Hustvedt—and her artist Bill—transfer this sense of ethnological “strangeness” to basic mythical fantasies of Western civilization itself.

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Fundamental aspects of Bill’s works become especially apparent in the picture that Leo bought, which is described in great detail at the very beginning and illustrates in nuce the novel’s concept of art. The large-format painting shows a young woman who, leaning on her elbow, is lying on the floor of an empty room. She is dressed only in a man’s T-shirt, looking in the direction of a bright light that apparently is falling on her from an invisible window, while her right hand, lying on her pubic bone, is holding a yellow miniature taxi cab. On the right, in the dark part of the picture, another woman, of whom only a walking foot in a low shoe is visible, is just leaving the room. A shadow is falling across the scene, indicating the presence of an observer and at the same time implicating the viewer in the picture. The title of the painting is, ironically, Self-Portrait, by Bill Wechsler, but as mentioned above, it is different from a conventional self-portrait in that the artist expresses his self in the figuration of others, two women, and is himself present in the picture merely as a shadow, that is, in the form of absence. Thus, this picture, in its “mixed styles and shifting focus” that reminds Leo of the “distortions in dreams” (5), represents precisely the idea of “mixing” as it is formulated by Violet: the individual self is essentially constituted only by its relatedness to others, as a “we.” Accordingly, the first of the numerous essays Leo writes about Bill’s works is titled “The Multiple Self.” Over the years, Leo keeps making ever new discoveries in this picture which are connected to the events taking place in the novel and seem to foreshadow these events almost prophetically: the erotic woman in the bright center, for example, seems to anticipate Bill’s passion for Violet, and the other woman walking away in the dark may indicate the split with Lucille, with whom Bill was still married at that time. However, the painting, just like the language of the novel, is not fully transparent to a determinable signified, but also is foregrounded as a signifier in its concrete materiality. The self-portrait of the artist manifests itself not so much through its content but rather through the vividness of its signifying energy: The hand that had painted the picture hid itself in some parts of the paining and made itself known in others. It disappeared in the photographic illusion of the woman’s face, in the light that came from the invisible window, and in the hyperrealism of the loafer. The woman’s long hair, however, was a tangle of heavy paint with forceful dabs of red, green, and blue. Around the shoe and the ankle above it, I noticed thick stripes of black, gray, and white that may have been applied with a knife, and in those dense strokes of pigment I could see the marks left by a man’s thumb. It looked as if his gesture had been sudden, even violent. (Ibid.)

The warmth of the powerful colors Bill uses for Violet’s hair contrasts with the shades of black and white and the aggressive force with which

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Lucille’s shoes are painted. The product of art contains the signature of a personal life, in which the conscious and the unconscious, design and spontaneity, referential and self-referential forces interact and produce an ambiguous, processual art open to ever new interpretations. Bill’s other works, too, reflect and transform this notion of self-exploration through the staging of other lives and selves. In his artistic development, Bill goes through various phases, from painting to installation and on to video art, assimilating a plurality of styles from postmodern art without losing himself in the changing fashions, and always connecting his work with the previous history of art. (His almost symbiotic relationship with Violet, which provides a crucial inspiration for Bill’s art, might be an allusion to video artist Bill Viola, whose innovations are always interrelated with art history, too.) For example, in an early creative period, Bill paints a number of portraits of his father, showing him from behind in a dark suit and always in the same pose, but at different stages of life. Onto these pictures he glues everyday objects and utensils from his father’s life, like letters, photographs, motel keys, etc. This technique evokes Robert Rauschenberg’s pop art, although Bill’s way of proceeding is described as more purposefully structured; the painted portraits of his father themselves, which can still be perceived, as in a palimpsest, through the layers of objects applied to the picture, even remind the narrator of seventeenthcentury Dutch paintings in the stringency of their composition. Moreover, there are parallels in Bill’s works with Willem de Kooning, the abstract expressionist who returned to representational art in the 1950s with a series of women paintings and whose technica mixta illustrates a vital principle of Bill’s art as well. Another one of Bill’s serial works centers on the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel, which was mentioned above, and which Bill investigates in its magical and nightmarish potentials. The combination of erotic and gothic motifs causes a scandal at the exhibition, but this only enhances Bill’s reputation. As if in a frenzy of productivity he depicts, in no less than 200 wooden boxes, different subjects and motifs from other fairy tales, comics, literature, and popular culture in installations reminiscent of Joseph Cornell’s boxes of collected items. In another group of works, O’s Journey, which Bill calls his “Great American Novel”, the letters of the alphabet become the protagonists of a series of differently arranged and equipped glass cases. The installation refers to The Scarlet Letter, the classic American novel in which the first letter of the alphabet, the A, plays a central role as a recurrent, polyvalent symbol. Bill’s spatial compositions vary in size and depth, include doors, secret chambers and human figures, and some of them can be entered by the visitor, so that the impression arises of a laby-

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rinth of interconnected artifacts that, on various levels, lay bare the inner landscapes of the mind, the emotions, and the unconscious. Although its combination of styles, its variability, its intermedial openness and strongly developed semiotic awareness make Bill’s art at first seem “postmodern,” it actually goes beyond postmodernism—firstly because of the strong, though indirect, presence of the personal in his works, and secondly because he does not merely construe self-referential aesthetic playworlds; on the contrary, his art, in spite of all its experimental radicalness, is authenticated only by its life-oriented search for truth, the search for a metamorphotic flux of life which remains beyond the grasp of categories and conventions: Bill’s work in particular was an investigation of the inadequacy of symbolic surfaces—the formulas of explanation that fall short of reality. At every turn, the desire to locate, stop, pinpoint through letters or numbers or the conventions of painting was foiled. You think you know, Bill seemed to be saying in every work, but you don’t know. I subvert your truisms, your smug understanding and blind you with this metamorphosis. When does one thing cease and another begin? Your borders are inventions, jokes, absurdities. (298)

Still, the pressures of life are sometimes too strong for art: the unsolved problems with Mark are a challenge that overtaxes Bill’s abilities. This becomes clear in his last, unfinished project entitled Icarus, a video series about children at different stages of life, from infancy to late adolescence. Bill, the architect of imaginary labyrinths, here sees himself as a Daedalus figure who failed because he was not able to prevent his son from crashing into the monstrous world he tried to exorcize aesthetically. But Bill did become an inspiration for the narrator, who translates the life of Bill, and the legacy of his art, into the ethics of a narrative which shapes the theme and composition of Hustvedt’s novel.

References Butler, Judith. Kritik der ethischen Gewalt. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2007. —: Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham UP, 2005. Dürr, Hans Peter. Traumzeit: Über die Grenze zwischen Wildnis und Zivilisation. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1978. Ette, Ottmar. (Über)Lebenswissen: Die Aufgabe der Philologie. Berlin: Kadmos, 2004. Grabes, Herbert. “Ethics, Aesthetics, and Alterity.” Ethics and Aesthetics: Eds. G. Hoffmann and A. Hornung. Heidelberg: Winter 1996. 13-28.

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Hoffmann, Gerhard, and Alfred Hornung, eds. Ethics and Aesthetics: The Moral Turn of Postmodernism. Heidelberg: Winter, 1996. Hustvedt, Siri. What I Loved. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2003. (Page numbers of quotations from the novel refer to this edition.) Inglehart, Robert. Modernization and Postmodernization. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. G. Bennington and G. Massumi. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984. —: “Ecology as Discourse of the Secluded.” The Green Studies Reader. From Romanticism to Ecocriticism. London: Routledge, 2000. 135-139. Mayer, Mathias. “Literaturwissenschaft und Ethik.” Theorien der Literatur: Grundlagen und Perspektiven. Eds. Hans Vilmar Geppert and Hubert Zapf. Tübingen: Francke, 2005. 5-20. Miller, Hillis. The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin. New York: Columbia UP, 1987. Nussbaum, Martha. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1990. Parker, David. “The Turn to Ethics in the 1990s.” Critical Review 33.3 (1993): 3-14. Platen, Edgar. Perspektiven literarischer Ethik: Erinnern und Erfinden in der Literatur der Bundesrepublik. Tübingen: Francke, 2001. Ricoeur, Paul. Das Selbst als ein Anderer. Munich: Fink, 1996. Zapf, Hubert. Literatur als kulturelle Ökologie: Zur kulturellen Funktion imaginativer Texte an Beispielen des amerikanischen Romans. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002.

WOLFGANG HALLET (GIESSEN)

Can Literary Figures Serve as Ethical Models? 1. Variations on the Theme Although the title of this essay is clothed in a question, it has a slightly didactic or pragmatic touch to it since, by implication, it presupposes that literary figures do serve some particular and identifiable purpose. Yet the number of functions that can be described for literary figures in narratives is almost infinite, ranging from intradiegetic functions of “agency,” “action” and “interaction” (thus constituting “narrativity”), to the creation of narrative social spaces and spheres, to offering the reader insights into psychological motivations and opportunities for personal identification or distancing, to mention only a few. On the other hand, the title is closely connected with the most basic questions that we, as readers and as critics of literary narrative texts, can ask, as Jerome Bruner does: [W]e wish to discover how and in what ways the text affects the reader and, indeed, what produces such effects on the reader as do occur. What makes great stories reverberate with such liveliness on our ordinarily mundane minds? What gives great fiction its power: what in the text and what in the reader? (Bruner 4)

The title implies that part of the answer to these questions lies in the power that literary figures obviously exert on readers in attracting their interest, personal involvement and sympathy, and that their actions as much as the values on which these actions rest indicate a close ethical relation between the fictional text and the reader. Readers of narrative literary texts, and of novels in particular, are clearly highly interested in how the figures in that narrative live and why they act or interact in certain ways: “Readers admire or abhor figures, they feel with them and imitate them in their real lives” (Jannidis 229: my translation, as are all subsequent quotes from this source). Therefore, literary figures can be regarded as particularly powerful factors in the communication of ethical orientation between the text and the reader, and they deserve closer investigation when the effects of narratives on the ethical orientation of readers and the respective cognitive processes are examined. Yet, although value-based judgments “probably determine the reader’s relation to literary figures considerably, only little research has been done in this field” (Jannidis 243), let alone empirical studies.

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Hence, there are a large number of unanswered questions related to the title of this essay, and it is obvious that there are an infinite number of more familiar variations to it: If at all, how are readers’ experiences with real life persons and those with literary figures related? Do readers learn from literary figures in the same way as they learn from real life persons? In life situations, do we ever—consciously or unconsciously—refer to fictional characters, their behavior, their attitudes and their beliefs, for orientation or to aid decision-making, possibly in the form of a positive or a negative foil and fully aware of the fictionality of this foil? Do we, perhaps unconsciously, integrate the conduct and minds of literary figures into our ethical concepts? In the most general sense, we might ask whether literary figures, like other elements of literary texts, leave behind discursive traces in the readers’ minds which then influence their everyday ways of thinking and acting. Possibly, the number of paradigmatic questions is infinite, and they will all feature on a continuum somewhere between a reader’s (more or less distanced) reflections on a fictional figure in the light of her or his own personal experiences on one pole, and, at the other end of the continuum, a literary figure as a personality to whom one can relate, “often as much alive as those we meet in everyday life” (Grabes 222). To make things yet more complicated, we must also assume that readers are affected and sometimes (mis-)lead by morally deficient characters, particularly in those cases in which they function as unreliable homodiegetic narrators: What kind of value system is implicitly being communicated to us through this technique that presents the clearly and egregiously wrong judgments of a homodiegetic narrator: If we are made by the discourses we experience, what does experiencing this discourse do to us? (Phelan, “Narrative Discourse” 137)

In part 5 of this essay, I will briefly return to this phenomenon of the ethics of reading. The implications that are of interest here point to the wider context and the cultural dimension of this transfer between literary figures in narratives and the readers’ real world, asking if there is “an ethical dimension to the act of reading as such” (Miller 84) and if so, what would that ethical dimension be? Does some moral good come to me out of the solitary act of reading? How would one measure that good accurately, and exactly what kind of good would it be—reinforcement and creation of my values, my further incorporation into the ‘values’ of my society? If the study of literature does me this good and demonstrates that language has this humane value as creator and sustainer of civilization, does my reading diffuse that good to others, to my students if am a teacher, to my readers if I am a critic? What good is reading? (Ibid.)

The assumption underlying this essay is that literary figures play a crucial role in the “creation” or “reinforcement” of values in the reception proc-

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ess, and that a good deal of the reader’s ethical involvement with narrative literary texts rests upon her or his interest in the literary figures’ conduct, actions, and ethical motivations, with the notion of ethical agency understood as a mutual concern in both the narrative literary text and in the reader’s own social space and life. To be more precise, it is assumed here that the construction of concepts of “ethical agency” requires an integration of two different dimensions (or ways of thinking); both of which are represented by literary figures and both of which are part of the cognitive formation of ethical models. One dimension is connected with the fact that “agency” cannot be conceived without “narrativity,” i.e., an agent initiating, conducting, or being involved in some action that leads to other actions (cf. Miller 85). In that sense, “ethical agency” is always concrete and embedded in larger narrative contexts which include situations and interaction with other agents (cf. 86). The other dimension is of a more abstract kind: although ethical orientation occurs in and is applied to concrete situations, or derived from them, it needs to exist in a cognitive form that is independent of particular situations or circumstances. Ethics in everyday life is therefore probably best conceived of as an individual, subjective theory (or a number of imperatives) of why people behave in certain ways (cf. Jannidis 192ff.) and of “how one should live” (cf. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge 50; also cf. Bredella 55ff.). In that sense, readers would regard literary figures as test cases of ethical conduct, and a narrative literary text would be read as a case study of how the value system of a particular literary figure (or figures) stands the (fictional) test. In that sense, narrative literary texts are always, at least partly, read allegorically. There is, in fact, historical evidence that discursive experiences in the act of reading may have very concrete, real effects on readers’ lives in a very literal sense: Werther, the protagonist of Goethe’s epistolary novel, became an idol, a true ethical model for readers, his contemporary male fellow human beings across Europe. Not only did they begin to dress in a style obviously emulating Werther’s as described by Goethe; Werther’s suicidal condition obviously led to a series of very real “copycat” suicides among the fictional character’s real life contemporaries. It seems that Goethe provided his readers with an apparently very valid ethical model that led to serious, even life-threatening consequences. This extreme example shows that, in the most general sense, the reading process can be regarded as a transgression of the boundary between the intradiegetic world of the literary figure and the extradiegetic world of the reader’s experiences. Most critical and narratological approaches are based on the assumption that literary texts, and their figures

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in particular, definitely do affect the reader cognitively and emotionally. My question, correspondingly, is how, rather than if, the value systems of literary figures and narrators are communicated to readers. As Herbert Grabes (“Turning Words”) and others (cf., e.g., Schneider Grundriß zur kognitiven Theorie der Figurenrezeption and “Toward a Cognitive Theory”) have shown, the place and space of this transgression is the reader’s mind and imagination. The cognitive processes that lead to or are involved in the bottom-up-processing of text-driven data into the formation of literary figures and top-down processes of imposing existing cognitive models and schemata onto literary figures, include their ethical conduct and value systems, too. There is a simple reason why this dimension of literary figures in narrative texts often features most prominently: It has often been pointed out that the reader has access to the minds, thoughts, and reflections of literary figures so that a reader can gain insight into a figure’s motives, ways of thinking, values and judgments. Whereas in the real world the mental dimension of behavior and the way of thinking that leads to certain actions remains oblique, readers often have direct access to the mental ethical categories and activities of literary figures. Concerning the actual cognitive processes on the reader’s side, empirical evidence is difficult to gain and there is not much evidence that can be offered in this inquiry of the cognitive process through which readers may acquire concepts or elements of mental models of literary figures and incorporate them into their ethical concepts. Instead, I have to rely on plausibility and experience. In that sense, this inquiry is “both empirical and practical” (Nussbaum, “Perceptive Equilibrium” 173): empirical “in that it is based on and responsible to actual human experience,” and practical in that it is conducted by someone who is himself “involved in acting and choosing” and who sees “the inquiry as having a bearing” (ibid.) on his own practical ends. Scholars, Martha Nussbaum argues, are part of such ethical endeavors since they do not inquire in a ‘pure’ or detached manner, asking what the truth about ethical value might be as if they were asking for a description of some separately existing Platonic reality. They are looking for something in human life, something, in fact, that they themselves are going to try to bring about in their lives. What they are asking is not what is the good ‘out there,’ but what can we best live by, and live together as social beings. (173)

It follows, then, that the notion of the literary figure as an ethical agent or as a model of ethical agency is in itself a cultural, historical, and ethical construct. It is impossible to identify values or (un-)ethical conduct in a narrative text unless one has a system of values. The assumption of a mental construct of ethical agency implies that cultural agents develop notions and conceptions of “how one should (not) live” and that narrative

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texts, including other narrative media like feature films, have an important contribution to make to such conceptions. Since it is also assumed that this contribution is directly connected with “narrativity,” I will draw upon research and findings in some of the relevant fields in an attempt to answer the title question. Before the foundations and elements of a theory of ethical models are discussed in detail in section 3, the literary example in section 2 serves to illustrate both the need for and some of the problematic sides of the assumption that the construction of ethical models is intrinsically connected with the reading process. 2. Unethical Figures into Ethical Models? To illustrate my hypothesis, I will use a very extreme literary example: Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange definitely is an “ethical” novel since it is, on the one hand, deeply concerned with individuals who, according to our ethical standards, lack every ethical sense. On the other hand, a reader may be inclined to sympathize with the four young criminals and with Alex, the protagonist, in particular, when in the second part of the novel they fall victim to a totalitarian regime and are subjected to a corrective course of treatment which forces ethical behavior upon unethical individuals. This novel also thematizes the unsettling question of whether and to what extent free will, the choice to do evil, is an indispensable part of any ethical existence, as Burgess explains in his 1988 introduction to the revised edition of the novel: [B]y definition, a human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange—meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State. It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil. The important thing is moral choice. (A Clockwork Orange ix)

These remarks confirm that Alex, the protagonist in this novel, can well be read as an “ethical model,” even in the allegorical sense. He is a very clear-cut literary figure: violent, sexist, and criminal, a rapist and a killer, Alex does not leave the reader much freedom to respond to him in anything other than ethically to his character. As readers, we are also aware that he, as an unreliable homodiegetic narrator, makes “clearly and egregiously wrong judgments” (Phelan, “Narrative Discourse” 137). There is even a whole philosophy of non-ethical conduct, part of which is a violent, murderous daily life that is directed against the social and moral standards of members of the middle class, such as writers or teachers, and a

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whole new language in which these sub-cultural ethics are encoded. How then, can such literary figures serve as ethical models? When we, as readers, “encounter” such literary figures, we probably relate it to our own concepts of teenage lives and adolescence. We will always have at least a faint idea of what sort of person or personality we would like a teenager to be. These may be very general visions and concepts of non-violence, honesty, open-mindedness and the like, and we will even develop vague concepts of their future lives conceiving of them as individuals who can look after themselves, live in peace and good health and be decent men and women who are aware of and responsible for what they are doing, who are autonomous to a good degree, and who are not dependent on other people’s good or bad will, and so forth. This illustrates that Burgess’s literary figure obviously contradicts all the reader’s notions on adolescence so that her or his concept of “how one should live” is the complete opposite of the literary figure’s ethics. In that respect, a literary figure could also help readers to make clear positive decisions and definitions, or it would confirm positive ethical concepts by providing the negative counter-image that a reader would like to evade. A literary figure can also be an instantiation of “how we should not or would not like to live.” Of course, things are not as simple as that in Burgess’s novel. There are other figures that make it far more difficult for us to decide whether their lives and their ways of thinking are agreeable or not. For instance, there is L.G. Alexander, a fictional author, who is a helpful, caring man who criticizes the treatment that Alex is forced to undergo as a humiliating and oppressive conditioning process conducted by a totalitarian government, but who, on the other hand, uses (or rather, misuses) Alex for political purposes in his campaign against the government. Once again, readers will apply their ethical concepts to measure this man’s ways of acting and thinking, trying to decide whether what he does is something that suits their ethical concepts or not, or in which respects they approve and in which respects they do not. There are a whole range of other figures—the prison vicar, the psychologist, the minister, Alex’s mother, a teacher, and so forth—and as they are all related to Alex and Alex relates to them, they are all subject to the reader’s judgments, which are all based on ethical concepts. Such “natural” responses by the reader have to be recalled here because it takes us directly to the cognitive features of ethical concepts: every time we measure and judge any of these characters, we will activate an ethical concept that is, on the one hand, an ensemble of some rather abstract principles, ideas, rules, and guidelines of what one should do and what one should not, and that, on the other hand, is related to a human agent, to an

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abstract person that does things, acts and behaves, who has motives and reasons to do so, and who is conscious of and responsible for what she or he is doing. Thus, an ethical model would combine or synthesize rather abstract guidelines, values and principles on the one hand, and an abstract human, an agent who is capable of doing things, of acting and thinking, on the other, very much like a figure in a narrative text. An ethical model would then be a figure-bound concept that provides a general framework that is applied when ethical judgment or behavior is required. There are various data and sources of information that the reader will use when evaluating a literary figure ethically and when integrating ethical elements connected with a literary figure into an ethical model. In Jannidis’s narratological conception of the literary figure a reader’s identification with a literary figure is, apart from “situation,” “expression,” and the way it is foregrounded, to a good deal determined by ethical evaluation (Jannidis 232ff.). According to Jannidis, data and information on the ethical dimension of a figure in a narrative are provided in five main forms (234f.)1: (1) explicit ethical evaluation of a figure by the narrator or another figure (2) an explicit ethical evaluation or statement by the figure itself (3) a literary figure’s actions and behaviour in relation to the reader’s ethical system (4) the course of action that may suggest to the reader how to judge a figure ethically, e.g., by rewarding or punishing it (5) stereotyped roles or models like “the detective” and “the criminal” in the detective story that imply, by way of convention, ethical judgement.

Thus, when it is suggested that literary figures are transformed into ethical models, it is more precise to say that it is the information and data on and around a literary figure that a narrative piece of fiction provides for the reader. This distribution of data makes it difficult to decide whether elements that are integrated into a reader’s ethical model are really part of the literary figure. Yet, since both the literary figure and the mental ethical model are cognitive constructs it suffices to assume that a reader incorporates textual information from the literary text in the ethical model that she or he ascribes to a literary figure. 3. The Readers’ Constructions of Mental Models and the Ethical Agency-Model From the wide range of disciplines and approaches in which relevant insights into the construction of ethical models may be found, I will consult _____________ 1

Cf. similar categories in Schneider, “Toward a Cognitive Theory” (613ff.).

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three areas of criticism and research in an attempt to conceive of reading as an act of constructing ethical models. (1) To be able to contend that mental representations exist which can function as ethical models, it is necessary to resort to cognitive psychology where a theory of mental models and their respective functions has been developed. Thus, the term “ethical model” is allocated to psychological theories of the mind and to research in the field of cognition (section 3.1). (2) With regard to the interest in the “literariness” of ethical models in the context of reading and literature, it is advisable to consider the specific type of information that literary texts offer on literary figures and that leads to different types of signification when literary figures are construed (section 3.2 of this essay). The literariness of a figure implies that features of this central narrative element may be incorporated in a mental model of ethical agency. This can be regarded as the cognitive presupposition of the hypothesis that is implied in the title of this essay. (3) The cognitive processes that occur during the reception process and the mental (re-)construction of literary figures are of particular interest here. I will therefore use some of the insights from cognitive narratology to suggest how ethical models are constructed and how they differ from the mental representation of a literary figure (section 3.3). In section 3.4, I will try to integrate descriptions and assumptions available in these three areas in my hypothesis, claiming that ethical models are figure-bound, yet abstract mental representations in which the idea of ethical agency—ways of living and doing things in the world—and guidelines along which lives are lived are synthesized. 3.1 Features of Mental Models A reader’s answer to a question like “How should one live?” (Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge 50) obviously requires the cognitive ability to understand and interpret the real world in order to be able to live and act in it ethically and successfully, and to process and to develop experience-based knowledge, social and cultural schemata, or cognitive strategies to master the challenges provided by real life. According to cognitive psychology, the mind therefore develops a cognitive network that interprets input from the environment and transforms it into concepts and schemata that enable us to respond and act appropriately in given situations (cf. Seel 50; Lenk). In that sense, a reader’s or any person’s real life, behavior and conduct can be regarded as the prime answer to all questions of ethics. Yet, there is a second mental network through which more complex models of the world are formed, representing all sorts of phenomena, processes, actions

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and interaction in the world on the basis of schemata and concepts. These mental models do not simply represent the actual world, but they can also perform imaginative actions, anticipate and interpret their outcomes, and draw conclusions as to whether something that is merely imagined may nevertheless be “true”: [M]ental models play a central and unifying role in representing objects, states of affairs, sequences of events, the way the world is, and the social and psychological actions of daily life. They enable individuals to make inferences and predictions, to understand phenomena, to decide what action to take and control its execution, and above all to experience events by proxy; they allow language to be used to create representations comparable to those deriving from direct acquaintance with the world; and they relate words to the world by way of conception and perception. (Johnson-Laird 397)

Following this definition, two features of mental models are highly interesting in our context: In order to develop a mental model, the mind must select the most important features of phenomena and transform them into generalizable cognitive structures. This is a prerequisite that makes it possible to apply mental models to a lot of different variations of the same phenomena and situations. Mental models can thus also provide answers to more or less abstract questions concerned with ways of life and value systems on which one’s actions are based. This explains why the same ethical model can serve to judge a large number of both very real as well as literary figures and their actions. A mental ethical model, then, though based on perceptions and experiences, is abstract and not concrete, and, vice versa, a literary figure can be regarded as one of several possible concretions of an ethical model. This feature also explains why mental models of figures and their actions can encompass more or less abstract rules and principles that are stored in mental ethical models. The second feature that is of interest in connection with literary texts and a reader’s ethical judgment is their anticipative quality. Mental models make propositions about imaginative (or: possible) worlds and they are able to simulate possible effects and outcomes of actions that are only considered or imagined. To the mental model, the fictional world of the novel and the action taken by a literary figure as well as the reader’s own imagination of an alternative world (the dream of a better world, a vision, a nightmare etc.) have the same cognitive status as data that are perceived as part of the reader’s real world experiences (also cf. Bruner 93ff.). This is where a first conclusion as to the existence of ethical models can be drawn: mental ethical models are, of course, informed by real world phenomena and experiences. But their abstract and simulative character also makes it possible to incorporate elements from fictional worlds in such cognitive constructions of ways of life. On the other hand, readers

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may regard actions taken by literary figures and their conduct as possible instantiations of an ethical model, as test-cases and options, or one among several possible realizations of the model. 3.2 Features of Literary Figures When discussing the transformation of (elements of) literary figures into ethical models, it is of course required to briefly reflect on the conception of this indispensable narrative element since it is obvious for a number of reasons that it cannot be a literary figure as a whole that serves as an ethical model since the amount of information on the figure in the literary text is in many ways limited. For instance, the physiognomic or bodily features of a figure may be difficult to extract from the literary text, a literary figure may appear in one particular situation only, as might be the case in short stories, or the conditions under which it lives and acts may be too distant, culturally or historically. Still, some of the sides or elements of a literary figure’s behavior or actions might find their way into a reader’s mental ethical model because they are regarded as ethically desirable or ideal. Obviously it is the more abstract rather than the more realistic sides of literary figures that can be transferred to ethical models. A more systematic approach to the structure of literary figures will confirm that their different dimensions are a prerequisite for their integration into the cognitive construction of ethical models. Phelan (“Narrative Discourse” 134) distinguishes three different aspects or dimensions of the literary “character” (also cf. Phelan Narrative as Rhetoric 29ff., Phelan Living to Tell about It 20, and Jannidis 228f.). According to this conception, character is (1) like a possible person, it resembles a human being. Phelan calls this the mimetic aspect. (2) “transindividual and ideational,” sometimes representing a group, sometimes an idea. This is the thematic aspect. (3) an artificial construct, it is synthetic.

Whereas the mimetic aspect helps the reader’s imagination to construct “a real person” and contributes to the verisimilitude of a literary figure, the thematic aspect and the synthetic aspect clearly show some proximity to features of a mental model: a literary figure is always representative, signifying something abstract beyond itself. In that sense it is allegorical, carrying features that represent ideas or concepts which can easily be processed and incorporated into a mental model and that can be transferred to other contexts and even to real human behavior. To illustrate this, Alex in Clockwork Orange can be read as an allegory of the social dam-

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age of ruthless violence so that the reader would activate or incorporate the ethical dimension of violence/non-violence in her or his mental ethical model. Once this has become or been confirmed as part of the ethical model, violence/non-violence would principally be a criterion for intended or experienced action and interaction or any moral judgment. The synthetic dimension shows even more proximity to mental models. Obviously, the reader’s cognitive construction and her or his ethical assessment of as well as her or his emotional responses to the literary figure have to rely on the aesthetic-symbolic representation of a figure in the narrative text and the ways in which it emerges from the textual structures in the process of narration. Therefore, constructedness and artificiality are features of literary figures as well as of mental models. Sometimes, as in Clockwork Orange, the reader is constantly kept aware of this artificiality of the figure named Alex and his world: Apart from an artificial, sub-cultural language (“nadsat”) that is foreign to the reader and that secludes the protagonist’s world from the rest of society, the homodiegetic narrator’s extreme behavior and judgment leave no doubt for the reader that he or she is witnessing a case study in which Alex “serves” as a role model that represents ethically unacceptable conduct and that is forcefully transformed into acceptable behavior by equally unacceptable means. Thus, on the story-level and on the discourse-level, the reader is kept aware that she or he witnesses an experiment, a test-case in the literal sense. The treatment that Alex undergoes is a scientific test, and later Alex is also celebrated as well as pitied as a scientific pioneer. It is, of course, necessary to emphasize that the literary figure is only one among numerous other elements of a narration and that it is constructed as the whole narrative unfolds. Thus readers will always conceive of the literary figure as being embedded in a social network in which it interacts or bonds with other figures, in a series of situations in which it acts and develops, and in a narrative structure in which its actions and utterances are organized. Through literary figures narrative texts provide models of social and cultural embeddedness, of decision-making in ever new situations, and of confirming or adopting one’s value system in response to changing situations. The literary figure, in other words, is a dynamic construct that undergoes permanent changes and that unfolds along with the whole of the narrative. This dynamic aspect is central to the conception of an ethical model and it bears the decisive difference between a model of ethical agency and a more static conception like a “system of values.” A mental model of ethical agency encompasses notions of action, change and development and the idea that an ethical subject can act and interact in given or self-made situations. Ethical agency is a process that occurs in social space and time. In such a mental model, an indi-

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vidual’s life itself can be regarded as a narrative in which the individual functions as the protagonist and the homodiegetic narrator. Due to this narrative dimension, ethical models provide regulations and strategies that make it possible to permanently adapt to new situations and conceive of ethical agency as a series of ethical decisions. To sum up, one could say that narratological theories of the literary figure provide some evidence that despite being mimetic, a literary figure, as a textual construct and as a mental representation, is relatively abstract, so that its thematic and its synthetic dimension can provide concrete elements (like, for instance, violent/non-violent behavior) that can easily be integrated into ethical models. The second important contribution that a narratological approach has to make to the concept of ethical agency is the dimension of “narrativity,” which places the individual (who, in our context, is identical with the reader) at the center of the model and assigns to her or him the role of a homodiegetic narrator in this mental model. 3.3 The Cognitive Construction of Literary Figures As has been described above, a literary figure is not “out there” in the literary text; it is “a mental construct,” “formed during the reception of a literary work” (Grabes 224). These constructs are, on the one hand, developed “bottom-up,” using and processing data and information available in the literary text. Readers of novels, so Schneider argues, focus their attention predominantly on psychological traits, emotions, and aims of characters that are more abstract and less dependent on the immediate circumstantial conditions of individual situations. (Schneider, “Toward a Cognitive Theory” 610)

On the other hand, since the information available on a literary figure is often very fragmentary and reduced, the reader makes inferences, relying on her or his world knowledge, subjective personality theory, stereotypes and even literary and generic knowledge. Thus, the mental model of the literary figure is the result of an interactional process in which “information from various sources, both textual and reader-centered, feed into the construction of mental character models” (611). The reader’s value system is, of course part of this interaction. It “allows him to pass moral judgments on the actions portrayed in the novel” (614) and on the literary figures as well as on the narrator’s and on the figure’s own judgments. According to Margolin, this latter aspect of literary figures and the corresponding activities of the reader are a pre-dominant aspect of reading novels:

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Readers need to formulate hypotheses about the minds of agents and ascribe to them mental functioning in order to make sense of their doings in terms of human actions and interactions. (Margolin 284)

Margolin also suggests that this kind of “meta-cognitive” reading—reading a literary figure’s mind—affects and changes the reader’s mental disposition, his mental models since it enriches our store of conceivable models of human experientiality, suggests various views about its underlying features and regularities, and enlarges, through example rather than theory, our sense of what it may mean to be human. (285)

If these meta-cognitive acts occur in the reader’s mind, it follows that ethical models also comprise a reflexive and a self-reflexive dimension, through which judgments on ethical acts, by literary figures and by the reader alike, are themselves subject to ethical judgment. The conception of literary figures as mental models constructed by the reader is the decisive link between the textual data and structures available in the narrative text and possible effects that these may have on the reader’s mind, as I have been arguing. If the literary character is a mental activity, a constructive process, and if active cognition is an indispensable part of reading, we can easily imagine how this activity affects every relevant dimension of the readers mind. If he or she has to construct action, behavior and motives of a literary figure, the reader must resort to her or his mental models of agency, behavior and ethical conduct. Otherwise, the reader will simply not be able to understand. These aspects of the mental model of a literary figure are also related to and required in the reader’s life-world. This is why information from both the literary text and from the reader’s real world can merge in the cognitive construction of an ethical model. 4. The Cognitive Construction of Ethical Agency As has been shown, a theory of a mental model of ethical agency that is partly based on the construction of literary figures can draw upon a lot of elements and aspects provided by narratological, psychological and cognitive approaches in literary studies. In a first step, I will synthesize these aspects from different research areas in a brief sketch of the concept of ethical agency as a mental model (section 4.1). Since this model is, of course, also fed by other sources such as real-life observations, knowledge and experiences, I will, in a second step (4.2), integrate the contribution of literary figures in a more comprehensive cognitive model of ethical agency that makes it more plausible why literary figures may really affect a reader’s mind and life.

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4.1 A Sketch of the Concept of “Ethical Agency” A synopsis of what has been said about mental models, ethical agency, and literary figures reveals that the textual and the cognitive construction of literary figures and the reader’s cognitive activities in the reception process correspond and overlap to such an extent that the cognitive construction of a literary figure and of ethical agency can be regarded as partly overlapping, partly closely connected and also complementary. The latter concerns the fact that when construing a literary figure as also being a model of ethical agency the reader has to rely on her or his world-knowledge, experience, and schemata, from which, on the one hand, missing information can be inferred, and which, on the other hand, is extended, revised or re-interpreted in the light of a literary text. The cognitive construction of a mental model of ethical agency and the way literary figures contribute to them can be summarized as follows: x Ethical models provide human beings with general orientation and, like all other mental models, make it possible to construct ethical orientation by evaluating an individual’s own or other individuals’ actions and behavior, or by anticipating and simulating the outcome of future ethical acts. Ethical models thus allow for playful, non-experiential, merely imagined ethical acts. x Ethical models are mental representations or conceptions of how one should best live (cf. Martha Nussbaum’s formulation), including, by negation, of how one should not live (Alex in A Clockwork Orange). These representations are figure-bound in an abstract sense, implying that ethical acts require ethical agency, i.e., they comprise an abstract conception of a figure (not a person and not any particular literary figure) who acts, makes ethical decisions and judgments and can be held responsible for them. x Literary figures provide the reader with instances (textual models) of ethical agency. They can create in the reader a sense of ethical action, and ideas of what ethical agency implies and how it is exerted. The reader’s ethical model is the foil against which a literary figure’s ways of living, acting and thinking are judged while at the same time a literary figure may modify this foil as certain premises and assumptions that are part of the model have to be adapted in the act of reading. x The figural, more concrete dimension of the ethical mental model is combined with abstract concepts, principles, rules and standards so that the ethical model is a representation of an abstract human being who employs them as a basis for ways of living, acting and thinking. These abstract ethical concepts can, at least

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partly, be directly retrieved from the thematic and the synthetic dimension of literary figures. Literary figures add the social, interactional and cultural dimension to an ethical model since they demonstrate that while they are ethically free and responsible as individuals, they simultaneously are and have to be social beings. Every ethical act is thus, by definition, a social and a cultural act. Literary figures can make readers aware of how and to what extent ethical acts affect others. As literary figures are embedded in social and cultural networks in which they act and make their moves, and because each of their actions leads to new actions, literary figures develop in the reader a sense of the narrativity of lives, i.e., the insight that single actions are always part of a larger narrative in which individuals feature as ethical agents and which, on the other hand, produce some social or cultural outcome that the individual alone cannot determine. Since ethical acts can be regarded as narratives in which the individual features as a homodiegetic narrator, ethical models as a whole can be conceived of as abstract narratives, including some sort of narrative structure that makes it possible to represent real, imaginary or simulated ethical acts and ethical agency in a mental model. Literary figures can contribute or extend a reader’s basic insight that there are restraints and limitations to every individual ethical act, that such an act can be self-contradictory or incoherent, or that it may be conflicting with other people’s ethical models and actions, thus requiring tolerance towards difference and alterity. Literary figures are mental constructs that, as a result of cognitive top-down processes, show themselves traces of the reader’s real world schemata, frames and scripts so that the latter may enter ethical models via a literary figure. Thus, literary figures may serve as amplifiers of pre-existing mental ethical-agency models. In the act of reading narratives from a historically or culturally distant period or space ethical models are exposed to or constructed under conditions of historical or cultural difference. If elements of literary figures form distant or cultures are transferred into a reader’s ethical model, it can be conceived of as a transhistorical and/or transcultural or hybrid construct. In that case, ethical models may be inconsistent and self-contradictory. However, such an assumption is necessary in order to explain why readers can cognitively, emotionally and ethically be affected by literary figures from distant or historical contexts and why elements of

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such figures can be incorporated in a mental model of ethical agency. x Ethical models encompass a self-reflexive and a meta-cognitive dimension so that this mental construct is subject to permanent revision and re-adjustment in the light of encounters with new literary figures in acts of reading and with real people and their ethical conduct in real life. To summarize, mental ethical models are one of the cognitive key functions in the process of reading that explain how literary texts may, more or less directly, affect a reader’s way of thinking and, more or less obliquely, her or his way of acting ethically. Interdiscursive exchange between the ethics of a literary text and real world value systems could thus be defined as the transfer of the (abstract) elements of the literary figure and the narrative to the reader’s ethical model. In particular, literary figures offer the reader the concepts of agency, of interaction, and of narrativity as integral dimension of models of ethical agency. Such mental models will themselves be applied to imagined ethical acts in the process of reading fictional texts as well as to simulations of future ethical acts or to real ethical acts in the reader’s own world. The following section will take a closer look at that interplay of various sources and different worlds in the cognitive construction of ethical models. Hitherto, the line of argument may have created the impression that the construction of ethical models is a universal phenomenon occurring in every reading process, regardless of time and place. This is, of course, not true. Like all mental models, ethical agency-models, too, are subject to cultural and historical conditions. As a matter of fact, the emergence of the concept of ethical agency itself may historically be directly related to the rise of the novel in the modern sense, as a response to the challenges to “choice and self-determination […] by industrialism and its attendant social changes, by science and its new methods of conceiving order and relating humans to the rest of a diverse world, and by a class system that insisted upon conformity” (Larson 24f.) in the nineteenth century or even as a response to “threatened agency” (35) in general. Therefore, the construction of mental models of ethical models is not a universal cognitive function of any sort, but deeply intertwined with the cultural position of the individual, the cultural emergence of agency and the cultural practices of the readers.

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4.2 Sources of Ethical Models As mentioned previously, it is of course not suggested that literary figures are the only source that feeds into ethical models. After all, people who do not read narrative literary texts develop ethical models, and they do act ethically, too, although it would be highly interesting to speculate about the differences between literature-fed models and others. The assumption that ethical models are informed by various sources (cf. fig. 1) is illustrated by a flow-charting narrative cycle (cf. the cognitive cycle in Jahn 201). These sources are (a) real life experiences and social interaction: socialization, education and cultural mediation in general are the most important external sources that we use to develop ethical models. These real life perceptions include all sorts of expository texts and media as well as all sorts of social and cultural experiences and interaction between real human beings. All of these are modeled into an ethical conception of “how one should live”; (b) literary and filmic texts in which literary or filmic (?) figures occur can be regarded as a second important source. As has been shown, because of their partly concrete and partly abstract or synthetic character and due to the cognitive construction of literary figures in the form of mental models, elements of ethical models can more or less directly be drawn from these literary mental constructs. (c) As has been mentioned, ethical models, like all other mental models, can conduct simulated acts and anticipate the outcome of future ethical acts. In the light of such simulations, pre-figured models of ethical agency may be revised and adapted with regard to some (undesired) disadvantageous outcome. Thus mentally internal and fictional acts in possible worlds may find their way into real life via mental ethical models. Thus, the construction of an ethical model is a complex interplay of reallife experiences, elements form mental models of literary figures and simulations (“fictions”) of the mental system itself. Returning to the question in the title, this is one of the reasons why there is a question mark. It cannot be claimed nor should it be suggested that there is a single causeeffect relation between a literary figure and an ethical model. On the other hand, the contention that elements of literary figures may contribute to ethical-agency models, and in that sense have a cognitive status comparable to real life experiences, can be sustained. In particular, literary figures enhance the development of the narrative, reflexive and meta-cognitive

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dimensions of ethical agency (or a sense of these) in the reader, i.e., those dimensions that are not necessarily connected with interaction with real people and with actions in real situations. The cognitive formation of ethical models perception / schemata

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5. The Reader as a “Clockwork Orange”? In the light of the preceding reflections on Alex, literary figures, and real world experiences, it is part of the conception of a model of ethical agency that we impose real world questions—as condensed in Martha Nussbaum’s “inclusive” question, “How should one live?”—on literary figures and their fictional world and thus naturalize them. On the other hand, though, literary figures are not figural models that would resemble real world idols. If they were supposed to be such idolatrous models, in 99 out of a hundred cases we would reject them and the literary work in which they appear as didactic or trivial. Furthermore, we would probably not find such literary figures likeable. According to Peter von Matt’s (2006) most recent socio-cultural history of literature titled The Intrigue (‘Die Intrige’; my translation, as for all following quotes), literature, as a field of “cultural ado” (von Matt 108), operates with two different, competing orders: that of “good vs. evil,” and that of “likeable vs. dislikeable.” Von Matt calls this complex relation between two competing orders the “actual realm of literature” (ibid.), directing the reader’s emotions and arousing her or his sympathy or antipathy and confronting it with the good/evil or the right/wrong dichotomy. Whenever the good/evil and the likeable/dislikeable orders are congruent, the result is a boring piece of lit-

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erature which we would qualify as propaganda or, as von Matt calls it, “didactic maltreatment” (109). In the reciprocal case, where all evil is likeable and where the reader is urged to sympathize with the evil-doer, a literary piece of work as well as the literary figures that it features will probably be regarded as hideous because it tries to “impose a system on the reader which he cannot possibly wish, which abuses her or him as an ethical being” (ibid.). What could be called the specifically literary experience, then, “owes itself to the turbulences that emerge from these two orders and that change from one page to the next, from one scene to the other” (von Matt 109). This is why an ethical model, eventually, is nothing like the representation of a single literary figure; rather, it is a more or less abstract figurative model, an agency-model (“How do I live?” “How do I behave?” “How do I relate to other humans?” “How do I construct my social space?”) that consists of generalizations, abstractions and conclusions drawn from the turbulences in which literary figures become inevitably involved. And yet, the transfer between the literary text and the reader’s mind must not be conceived of as a mechanical act, as an automatism. Instead it must be emphasized, as J. Hillis Miller does, that the reader must always have a choice. Reading as an ethical act must also be free, in the sense that I must be free to do or not do it, therefore must take responsibility for it. How could I be held responsible for something I could not do? At the same time I must be determined in any act properly to be called ethical by some imperative ‘I must; I cannot do otherwise.’ Some such demand or exigency, I claim, is an essential feature of those acts that can legitimately be called ethical, including, therefore, acts of reading insofar as they can properly be called ethical. (Miller 85)

If, then, reading as an ethical act “must be both free and at the same time the response to a categorical imperative” (Miller 86), Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange can be read as an allegory of the ethical act of reading. Reading is only an ethical act if it is not regarded as a process of ethical conditioning. If the reader, like Alex in the novel, “ceases to be a wrongdoer” because he has no choice, “he ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice” (A Clockwork Orange 145), as the prison vicar in the novel puts it. Literature would then turn the reader into “a clockwork orange,” “into something other than a human being,” as a fictional author in the novel says to Alex: “You have no power of choice any longer. You are committed to socially acceptable acts, a little machine capable only of good” (A Clockwork Orange 180). It is probably part of the act of reading fiction that we are aware of the literariness of the narrative and the literary figures that we construct

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from it. Literary texts cannot exert power on us, and we are free to incorporate literary figures in our ethical models or to deny them access to our minds. If reading itself is an ethical act, we are even free to close the book and stop being readers.2

References Bredella, Lothar. “Wie sollen wir literarische Texte lesen? Überlegungen zum ‘guten Leser’.” Literarisches und interkulturelles Verstehen. Ed. Lothar Bredella. Tübingen: Narr, 2002. 34-79. Bruner, Jerome. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986. Burgess, Anthony. A Clockwork Orange. 1988. Rev. 1st ed. New York: Ballantine Books, 1991. Grabes, Herbert. “Turning Words on the Page into ‘Real’ People.” Style 38.2 (2004): 221-235. Johnson-Laird, Philip Nicholas. Mental Models : Towards a Cognitive Science of Language, Inference, and Consciousness. Reprint. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. Herman, David, ed. Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Stanford: CSI Publications, 2003. Jahn, Manfred. “‘Awake! Open your eyes!’ The Cognitive Logic of External and Internal Stories.” Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Ed. David Herman. Stanford: CSI Publications, 2003. 195-213. Jannidis, Fotis. Figur und Person: Beitrag zu einer historischen Narratologie. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004. Larson, Jil. Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Lenk, Hans. Bewusstsein als Schemainterpretation: Ein methodologischer Integrationsansatz. Paderborn: Mentis, 2004. Margolin, Uri. “Cognitive Science, the Thinking Mind, and Literary Narrative.” Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Ed. David Herman. Stanford: CSI Publications, 2003. 271-294. Miller, J. Hillis. “Is There an Ethics of Reading?” Reading Narrative. Form, Ethics, Ideology. Ed. James Phelan. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1998. 79-101. _____________ 2

I am indebted to Simon Cooke from the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture at Justus-Liebig-University Giessen for his linguistic advice and revision of this paper.

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Nussbaum, Martha C. Love’s Knowledge. Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990. —: “Perceptive Equilibrium: Literary Theory and Ethical Theory.” Love’s Knowledge:. Essays on Philosophy and Literature. 168-194. —: Poetic Justice. The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. Phelan, James. Reading Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideology. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1998. —: “Narrative Discourse, Literary Character, and Ideology.” Reading Narrative. Form, Ethics, Ideology. Ed. James Phelan. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1998. 132-146. —: Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1996. —: Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2005. Schneider, Ralf. Grundriß zur kognitiven Theorie der Figurenrezeption am Beispiel des viktorianischen Romans. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2000. —: “Toward a Cognitive Theory of Literary Character: The Dynamics of Mental Model Construction.” Style 3.4 (2001): 607-640. Seel, Norbert M. Psychologie des Lernens: Lehrbuch für Pädagogen und Psychologen. Munich: Reinhardt, 2000. Toolan, Michael J. Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction. London: Routledge, 1988. von Matt, Peter. Die Intrige: Theorie und Praxis der Hinterlist. Munich: Hanser, 2006.

JÜRGEN SCHLAEGER (BERLIN)

The Ethical Dimension of Cognitive Poetics and “A Mechanism of Sensibility” This title, particularly its second part, is, I hope, appropriately mysterious and therefore in need of elucidation. I have taken it from the paragraph in T.S. Eliot’s essay on “The Metaphysical Poets” in which we also find his famous and famously controversial remark about a “dissociation of sensibility” which, so Eliot, set in during the seventeenth century, and from which English poetry has never recovered (287 f.) To redress the observed imbalance or dissociation, Eliot argues, it is not enough, as others have suggested, to look into our hearts and write but instead “[o]ne must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system and the digestive tracts” (290). Eliot’s mentioning of the cerebral cortex and other bodily functions as points of reference for understanding what the metaphysical poets were doing was never really taken seriously but shrugged off as pseudo-scientific fireworks, irrelevant to the debate about the merits and flaws of this generation of seventeenth-century writers. It was probably also ignored because it is not so much a statement about a particular type of poetry, but about the relationship of such poetry to the workings of the human brain. After thirty years of dramatic advances in the neurosciences and the theory of cognition it has become less easy to disregard such references as mere pieces of rhetoric. Maybe Eliot’s remark, thrown in at the end of his argument, and for that matter, even Dr. Johnson’s eighteenth-century definition of metaphysical writings as a poetic strategy in which “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together” (798), contain more than a nugget of cognitive insight. And maybe there is also a hidden ethical agenda in both positions. The case of the Metaphysicals, of Dr. Johnson’s attack on them and of T.S. Eliot’s attempt to exonerate their poetic practices provide excellent examples for two concepts of literature whose relationship to questions of ethics and morality could not be more different. We have seen during this conference that the relationship between ethics and literature has changed continuously through history. We have also seen that literary periods can be defined by their attitudes to that relationship. There are examples of an instrumentalization of literary strategies for the promotion of an ethical agenda and there are examples for

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literary movements that violently refuse to be drawn into such questionable business which, they claim, threatens literature’s “aesthetic autonomy,” i.e., sacrifices its power to reveal a unique kind of truth for the sake of instruction, of getting a particular message across. Maybe there is a peculiar logic in the unfolding of these shifts and in the concomitant changes in attitudes which we have only begun to understand. I think cognitive theory may help us to make headway in this matter. Last year the novelist A. S. Byatt published an interesting essay about “Feeling Thought” (which is another quotation from Eliot’s essays on the metaphysical poets) in which she argued that the imagination of writers who use as a preferred poetic strategy what later came to be known as metaphysical conceits plays upon and exploits mental processes which cognition theory and the neurosciences of the mind have discovered as crucial for all mental activities and central to the ways we make sense of our world: The pleasure Donne offers our bodies is the pleasure of extreme activity of the brain. He is characteristically concerned with the schemas we have constructed to map our mental activities—geometry, complex grammatical constructions, physiology, definitions. He is thinking about thinking. He demonstrates what thinking about thinking feels like. Donne’s games with grammar […] are the feeling of thought. (248)

The metaphysical poets and the metaphysical conceit as their main strategy produce aesthetic pleasure, so A.S. Byatt, by exploiting and extending the range of one particular, though central, aspect of our cognitive apparatus. The upshot of all this seems to be that concepts of the mind and concepts of poetry as specific ways of using the mind’s strategies for generating and processing meaning through sophisticated strategies of handling language have come much closer to each other. This is perhaps a good opportunity to have another look at their interaction in a historical perspective, since the application of cognitive theory and of concepts of the mind’s workings based on neurobiological research promises a number of interesting new angles on such old questions as: x What does poetry specifically, and literature in general, contribute to the development of human mental capacities? x What does the existence of a particular kind of poetry but also of styles, conventions, genres, and narrative strategies tell us about the culture- and time-specific ways in which the mind decodes, encodes and transmits meaning in language? x What is the relationship between a genetically determined brain structure and a mind that builds up its processing capacity in and

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as a response to a historically specific, highly complex and diversified cultural environment? x How can we understand the sequence of styles and ideational paradigms other than as a sequence that depends entirely on contingent influences and individual choices? It is obvious that all these questions do not fit neatly into any one of the Holy Trinity of categories: epistemology, aesthetics and ethics, but cut across them in innumerable ways. The last question implies a more general point which I can only hint at here, but which has been an embarrassment that has haunted all versions of literary history: the embarrassment that consists in having to explain how one movement or development grew out of others without ever being able to say precisely why it happened. All along, literary history has been strong on description but weak on explanation. All too often our explications of cultural, social, ideological or poetological factors that have contributed to the shaping of literary movements masqueraded as causalities. “A” influenced “B” or “B” reacted to “A,” so “C” happened. This produces a kind of hybrid discourse which interweaves description with explanation and causality, hoping that readers will not ask too many uncomfortable questions or simply relying on the mind’s tendency to see and believe in logical connections where none exist. Before we allow such fundamental problems of history writing to carry us too far afield, and as a way of getting back to cognitive poetics and the question of ethics, I would like to give you a story which will take us right into the middle of what cognition theory, as I see it, is all about and where the interactions of cognitive processes and value systems usually have their preferred field of action. The story is taken from Hugo Hamilton’s wonderful account of his childhood: The Speckled People. He grew up in a family with an Irish nationalist father and a German mother and more than a handful of brothers and sisters. Family life was dominated by a very strict language regime. Only two languages were allowed: German and Irish. Whenever the children were caught playing with the English-speaking neighbor’s children, they were severely punished by their father. Hugo’s mother, on the other hand, always tried to mediate. She provided a buffer of kindness, wisdom and pragmatism between the father’s obsessive nationalism and the requirements of everyday family life. One day she commented on what she thinks is the basic difference between the way the Irish and the Germans use their languages: She says German people say what they think and Irish people keep it to themselves and maybe the Irish way is sometimes better. In Germany, she says, people

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think before they speak so that they mean what they say, while in Ireland, people think after they speak so as to find out what they mean. (Hamilton 57)

Hearing or reading this passage one spontaneously tends to acknowledge the valuable kernel of truth in her distinction. It could well be that the Irish are more irresponsible in their attitude to language, and are, therefore, more poetically minded, mysterious, mythological and funny; the Germans, on the other hand, more philosophical, hard-headed and probably, as a consequence of the suffering involved in such an attitude, more given to self-pity. But that is not why I have quoted the passage. It is important for me here in this context because the obvious differences hide a common truth: that thinking and speaking, thought and its expression are not the same, that the processes of thought production and the structures of language in which thought is communicated are in some fundamental sense different—and curiously enough, that it is this difference that explains why language works so well most of the time. This situation also led some poets and writers to radical statements such as the one recently made by the Norwegian dramatist Jan Fosse, who said in an interview in the Süddeutsche Zeitung: “Those are the magic moments on the stage, when the characters say so much without speaking a single word. Literature is made up from words, and yet its essence lies outside language” (23 May 2006, 13; my translation). The difference between language and thought processes is of course the starting point of all the cognitive research I have found useful as a literary scholar. I know there is another tradition running from Saussure through Chomsky to Fodor and beyond to poststructuralist epistemology which insists that there is a close fit if not identity between the structures of thinking and the grammatical structures of language, but universal experience with difficulties of finding the right words and with semantic ambiguities of even the most simple sentences point to some gap between thought and language or, at least, to complex sorting, processing and networking activities of the mind which do not operate like strings of grammatical sentences. True, there are moments when our minds are optimally tuned and language spreads out like a finished script in front of our mind’s eye so that it looks as if we just have to read it out loud. But all too often this is not what happens when we start thinking. All too often the early stages of the thinking process feel more like a groping in the dark. I could not put this particular point of view any better than Gilles Fauconnier in his Mapping in Thought and Language: “A recurrent finding has been that visible languages are only the tip of the iceberg of invisible meaning construction that goes on as we think and talk” (1).

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The “invisible iceberg” Fauconnier is talking about consists of networks of conceptualizations for which our need for orientation and space and to control motion provide the evolutionary basis. Fauconnier talks about mapping strategies as being at the core of all mental activities: “Mappings operate to build and link mental spaces” (11) which are part of the even more inclusive mental domains. He argues that [i]n the case of language, the domains that we need in order to understand language functioning are not in the combinatorial structure of language itself; they are in the cognitive constructions that language acts upon.[…]Paradoxically, modern linguistics, with its overriding emphasis on syntax, got itself connected to a mathematics without mappings, exactly the sort that will not help us for the study of meaning. (13)

On the basis of these general assumptions about how the mind works (and leaving aside, for the moment, how such mind activities are linked to and produced by the evolutionary neurobiology of the brain), Fauconnier, Turner, Pinker and a host of other scholars have offered a huge array of concepts with which they are trying to capture how this hidden language of the mind (sometimes called “mentalese”) operates (Pinker 69-70, 8690). Most of these concepts are trying to capture the architecture of the human brain, i.e., the spatial distribution of mental activities and their interaction. It comes as no surprise that—since we are a long way away from understanding exactly what is going on—most of these concepts have a strong metaphorical flavor. Mappings and frames, paths and force dynamics, schemata and lattices of mental spaces, grids and networks are used to describe the cognitive arrangements; base, viewpoint and focus serve as concepts for the way in which they are interconnected. They all are coined to help us understand the parabolic journey of the mind in its efforts to construct and process meaning. Lakoff and Johnson’s study of Metaphors We Live By and their investigation into how minds manage to coherently structure our experience provide some of the answers needed here (3 ff.) “Blending,” a term defined and given a central place by Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier in their book The Way We Think is crucial to all brain activities, especially to those activities which we tend to call creative (17 ff.). Blending happens when we are faced with a challenge of understanding something new for which the frames and mental spaces and domains are not yet in place. The new information operates like a searchlight that is looking for any aspect in the available grid of mental maps where it can locate itself. In terms of evolutionary neurobiology, the human brain is designed to make sense out of what it perceives, however fragmentary and unreliable

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the information is on which it has to operate. The brain is thus given to opportunism, to makeshift arrangements, to short circuiting. We usually call ethics what makes it work. Confronted with unusually complex packages of information, the brain has to restructure the existing arrangements in its mental atlas, thereby dislodging the structures that form the mainstay of the established ethical system. Ultimately, some new grid that is able to accommodate more information than the old one will emerge. If this new grid proves useful it will eventually provide the basis for a new system of ethics. Maybe this is what Hans Blumenberg meant when he defined “all forms and elements of metaphorical speech as strategies with which the human mind runs ahead of its rational conclusions” (7). Blumenberg, of course, believes that this is only preliminary to ratiocination. For Fauconnier, Turner and others, blending, i.e., the use of metaphorical constructions, is not preliminary but central to any act of cognition. And keeping this capacity of our mental apparatus in optimal shape is, one might say, not merely a matter of aesthetics, but also of the adaptability and viability of value systems, of ethics. The blending capacity of the mind is also an aspect of its cognitive operations which can help us understand more clearly what poets are doing when they make extensive use of metaphors and metonymies (as major strategies for blending) and perhaps also what poets are doing when they deliberately avoid such rhetorical strategies. In short, they may give us a clue why the ice fields of conventions are continually shifting and why they will form new configurations as a response to changing circumstances. If we take this admittedly still rather sketchy picture about what happens in the mind and its meaning-production processes when people use language to face new challenges and explore new dimensions of the outside world and experience and apply it to my first case, metaphysical poetry or more narrowly metaphysical wit, one can understand why Dr. Johnson, the defender of general human nature and a rational world picture, was deeply worried about them and why T.S. Eliot thought it fit to resurrect them from obscurity and make them into something like forerunners of radical modernism. Here is Dr. Johnson’s well-known description of the metaphysical concept of wit: Wit, like all other things subject by their nature to the choice of man, has its changes and fashions, and at different times takes different forms. About the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets […]. If the father of criticism has rightly denominated poetry […], an imitative art, these writers will without great wrong lose their right to the name of poets, for they cannot be said to have imitated anything: they neither

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copied nature nor life; neither painted the forms of matter nor represented the operations of the intellect. (797 f.)

Except for the last statement Dr. Johnson is, of course, absolutely correct. If we have to understand by the operations of the intellect the operations of conscious reasoning, then, of course, Dr. Johnson is right here, too, but I believe he misses one fundamental point. Let us carry on with his criticism before we tackle this point. Johnson uses Pope’s definition of wit as “that which has been often thought, but was never before so well expressed” (a misquotation from the Essay on Criticism), to set off their particular use of imagery. Compared with the Augustan ideal of wit they certainly never attained, nor ever sought it; for they endeavoured to be singular in their thoughts, and were careless of their diction […]. [T]o wit of this kind the metaphysical poets have seldom risen. Their thoughts are often new, but seldom natural; they are not obvious, but neither are they just; and the reader, far from wondering that he missed them, wonders more frequently by what perverseness of industry they were ever found. But Wit, abstracted from its effects upon the hearer, may be more rigorously and philosophically considered as a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike. Of wit, thus defined, they have more than enough. The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtilty surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and though he sometimes admires is seldom pleased. (798 f.)

At least Dr. Johnson admits that the readers might be sometimes pleasantly surprised by what they are given by the metaphysical poets. But since everything they do and say runs counter to his idea of a rational poetry as the proper technique for imitating a rational creation, he had to dismiss their efforts as ethically irresponsible and even perverse. What he misses completely and what cognitive theory makes us see now is that the strategy which the metaphysical poets adopted is crucial for creating the linguistic conditions for emergence, for restructuring the mental spaces and domains to accommodate new complexity in a radically changing world, whereas Dr. Johnson’s, Pope’s and, for that matter, Dryden’s recipe for proper poetry points to a completely different project that was dominated by an ethical agenda, the heart of which was Enlightenment ideology. If, however, we concentrate on the descriptive rather than on the critical parts of Johnson’s assessment we can see how much of it can be directly translated into the cognitive terminology we have discussed before, and how short-sighted it was for him to refuse the Metaphysicals the honor of calling them poets in their own right.

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T.S. Eliot, on his part, insists that what Johnson criticized so severely is indeed a great achievement of the metaphysical poets, and he adopts their capacity for a direct sensual apprehension of thought as a model for what is needed in the modernist reaction to the established post-Romantic poetic practices. If the cerebral cortex is indeed what modern poetry should address and use first and foremost, then one can understand his appreciation of the metaphysical conceit as a creative mental device for extending the cognitive potential of the mind—especially its capacity to rearrange the grids and lattices of mental spaces that tradition had hardwired into its system. This is obviously what the confusions and complexities of the modern world require more than anything else. Therefore the formula “values in and through poetry” is exchanged for the formula “poetry as value,” or, in Ezra Pound’s words: “It is as important for the purpose of thought to keep language efficient as it is in surgery to keep tetanus bacilli out of one’s bandages” (22). And literature, and particularly its most condensed form, poetry, does exactly that. Eliot was certainly right to insist that the ‘metaphysical’ explorations of the seventeenth-century poets was not a mere leisure activity of half a dozen intellectuals with time on their hands, but an answer to cultural processes that required radical rearrangements of the cognitive apparatus. That this is so becomes obvious when one looks at the general situation— culturally, religiously, cosmologically, philosophically—these generations of writers found themselves in: To take a short-cut here I would like to use George Parfitt’s description of that cultural moment to which the Metaphysicals reacted: It is really not at all surprising to find that the seventeenth century contains both the assertion of traditional worlds and the beginnings of new ones, this being in the nature of things. […] The fact that the old and the new co-exists makes for increased complexity. (8)

And this complexity is what the metaphysical conceits use and address in ever new variations. The comparative narrowness of the range of topics they write upon masks the fact that all these topics are culturally and even anthropologically of fundamental importance: love, life and death, sin and salvation, and last, but not least, the infinitude of correspondences in the structure of the universe. The Metaphysicals, and this is their distinguishing characteristic, are not trying to use blending as a means to decorate or make rhetorically effective a firmly entrenched ethical agenda or to establish a new harmony between the divine will and human volition. All their metaphysical constructions are highly fragile, multifaceted, provocative and not made to produce stable meanings. They break up the arthritic traditions without putting something equally solid in their place. They orchestrate what Reu-

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ven Tsur has called “organized violence against established cognitive processes” (4). They demonstrate and train the capacity of the mind for radical gear shifts and this is what not only T.S. Eliot but many readers after him have perceived as their particular aesthetic quality. If there are obvious deficiencies and contradictions in their ethical standpoints—so be it. To open up access routes to the mind’s capacity for reconceptualizing the world always involves a willing suspension of those concepts which traditionally control and channel the data-processing. The increase of the combinatorial potential which their poetry achieves forces the information processing into a state of flux and constant activity. One can, of course, understand now the hesitations and aversion of Dr. Johnson against such anarchic practices. He is one of the main representatives of a reaction against the cerebral gymnastics of the Metaphysicals, which had to be brought under control by all means. To cut a long story short, the ethical and poetic program of the Augustans was also fuelled by a desire to put a stop to what their forerunners had dared to do. Metaphysical wit was replaced by Augustan wit. And Augustan wit helped establish altogether different processing conventions in our cognitive apparatus. The generation of writers and intellectuals who followed the turbulences of the seventeenth century was obviously determined to pull the loose ends together and bring what had emerged as a new, highly complex world picture under ideological and aesthetic control. The conceptual framework which was designed to achieve this was based on rationalism, Enlightenment Latitudinarianism, physico-theology, and its clockwork concept of creation, and prospered on a general weariness of society regarding any kind of radical experiment, politically, ethically, religiously. Many people were involved in the grand project that emerged from it, building a conceptual grid that would accommodate the various domains and defuse their explosive potential. This project also involved the attempt to bring the senses, through “taste” and a theory of the beautiful and the sublime, under moral control. Cognitively Augustan poetry clearly overplayed its hand. As Anthony Giddens once put it: “the Enlightenment project of replacing arbitrary tradition and speculative claims to knowledge with the certainty of reason proved to be essentially flawed” (83f.). Its determined didacticism tied the Metaphysics’ poetic language to a program of formal harmonization and provoked anarchic reactions of the sort we find in the many satires written at that time, but also in the cult of sentiment and a growing demand for the exotic a couple of generations later. The Augustans developed a specific strategy to use and privilege the mind’s tendency to make any available set of information, however frag-

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mentary, consistent with Enlightenment tenets. Pope is here a very good case in point. The steady rhythm of the heroic couplet which he developed to perfection was ultimately meant to sustain his claims for harmony and consistency, for a poetic theodicy, in which he would “vindicate the ways of God to Man” in a picture of the world in which “Whatever is, is right”: All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee; All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see; All Discord, harmony, not understood; All partial Evil, universal Good: And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite, One truth is clear, ‘Whatever IS, is RIGHT.’ (Pope, Epistle I 289-294)

However much one might admire the polish of these lines the dictatorial full stop at the end cannot be overlooked. With this kind of totalization Pope obviously tried to put the cognitive potential of the mind in a rational and formal straightjacket. We all know about the revolt against overly simple harmonization and the overvaluation of reason in the eighteenth century. What a cognitive approach allows us now is not just to state that in a kind of hydraulic model the suppressed emotions were gradually given their due in the course of the eighteenth century, a development which culminated in the Romantic Revolution, but to explain it as a cognitively necessary counterstrategy against the limitations of the Augustan project. What, after all, were the options after the Augustans’ successful war on the organized violence against established cognitive processes which they had detected in the seventeenth century? The one dimension and resort of mind processes that had been suppressed, sidelined or unused are the emotions. As Antonio Damasio, Joseph LeDoux, Ronald de Sousa, Daniel Goleman and others have made clear in recent years, the emotions play an important part in blending and domain management. Emotions are significant factors in the multidimensional processing of conceptualizations and are not just the background music of more important conscious intellectual mental activities. They are themselves often central for providing a mental environment in which domains and mental spaces organize the increased traffic between them. It is true that they also have a tendency to attach themselves to existing concepts and make them harder to unlodge. This is the sticky side of Romanticism and this explains the modernist reaction against it. When we look at the Romantic project from this point of view it is obvious that they had a problem of making the emotions, the most unspecific and structurally underdetermined part of mental activities, into something that sounded solid, real and authentic. In other words, the Romantics had to develop strategies that would provide for the need of

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emotions to be nested, to give them a focus around which their cognitive capacity could be fully developed. And that point of reference is a concept of the self, the self as the focus of all mental activities, all experiences, and of an authentic experience (in and with “Nature”) that would fill in the ethical void created by the massive shift of focus which they initiated. It was not to last. The rest of the story has been told by Marshall, Ronald, Herbert and others. What I would like to hypothetically insist upon, however, is that the sequence of cognitive experiments which we have seen unfolding through the centuries is not haphazard, but there is some logic behind the seeming confusion. The same I would like to claim for my paper, but that is fortunately for you to decide.

References Blumenberg, Hans. Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie. Bonn: Bouvier, 1960. Byatt, Antonia S. “Feeling Thought: Donne and the Embodied Mind.” The Cambridge Companion to Donne. Ed. Achsah Guibbory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. 247-258. Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens. London: Harcourt, 1999. Eliot, Thomas Stearns. “The Metaphysical Poets.” 1921. Selected Essays. London: Faber, 1934. 281-291. Fauconnier, Gilles. Mappings in Thought and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner. The Way We Think. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991. Goleman, Daniel. Emotional Intelligence. London: Bloomsbury, 1995. Hamilton, Hugo. The Speckled People. London: Fourth Estate, 2004. Johnson, Samuel. “Lives of the Poets: Abraham Cowley.” Prose and Poetry. Selected by M. Wilson. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1966. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. LeDoux, Joseph. The Emotional Brain. London: Phoenix, 1998. Parfitt, George. English Poetry of the Seventeenth Century. London: Longman, 1985. Pinker, Steven. How the Mind Works. London: Penguin Books, 1997. Pope, Alexander. “An Essay on Man.” 1733-44. Alexander Pope. Ed. Pat Rogers. Oxford: Oxford UP 1993. Pound, Ezra. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Ed. T.S. Eliot. London: Faber and Faber, 1960. Sousa, Ronald de. The Rationality of Emotion. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990.

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Tsur, Reuven. Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishing Company, 1992. Turner, Mark. The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.

II. History Inspiring Theory

ASTRID ERLL (GIESSEN)

Ethics in Stone: The Architecture of the Raj 1. Introduction: Ethics and Architecture Ethics is not only an important issue as far as the medium of literature is concerned. It is also closely connected with the production, reception and scholarly study of other media, such as painting, photography, film, or sculpture. This article will address the role of ethics with regard to the medium of architecture. The strong link between architecture and ethics derives from the fact that architecture is often considered to be the most “social” of all art forms, one that ostensibly functions to benefit society. Viewed in this way, architectural structures can be perceived as built responses to that key question of communal ethos: “How shall we live?” They present “ethics in stone.” The search for an ethics of architecture may exasperate those theorists who prefer a somewhat more aesthetic and individualist understanding of the medium. But it has a long history, dating back to Vitruvius, the first architectural theoretician, who linked architecture with the very origins of culture; and ethical concerns also lie at the heart of modernist and postmodernist discourse about architecture: Le Corbusier, for example, emphasizes that “architecture has for its first duty that of bringing about a revision of values” (qtd. in Capon 99). In his classic of modern architectural theory, Space, Time, and Architecture, Sigfried Giedion maintains that the main task of contemporary architecture is “the interpretation of a way of life valid for our period” (qtd. in Harries 2). The authors of a recent handbook on Ethics and the Practice of Architecture proclaim one of the “central essences of architecture: that it is an act of human creation, and that once built it conditions our existence—architecture is cultural mores physically constructed” (Wasserman et al. 1).1 Karsten Harries, finally, asks in what is one of the most substantial books on the relation of ethics and architecture: “Should architecture not continue to help us find our place and way in an ever more disorienting world?” And he continues by high_____________ 1

Wasserman et al. also differentiate between various dimensions of the relation of ethics and architecture, as can be seen in their following definition: “Architecture—in all of its manifestations from design and decision processes, to theoretical studies, education, and built works—as a discipline, is a collection of practices that is inherently ethical: directed to the well-being of humankind” (Wasserman, Sullivan, and Palermo 8).

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lighting the inherently collective, communal dimension of all architectural practice: “By the ethical function of architecture I mean its task to help articulate a common ethos” (Harries 4).2 In the following, I will discuss the complex relationship of ethics and architecture by taking the colonial situation of nineteenth-century India as an example. In this context of an ongoing negotiation between the values of colonizer and colonized, Indian as well as British building was steeped in ethical meaning. This article will show how an “ethics of architecture” became an integral part of the imperial project in the nineteenth century, how the British translated architectural styles into ethical considerations and from there into power politics. I will proceed in three steps: The first part will be concerned with the nineteenth-century critic of visual arts and society John Ruskin, the most notorious ambassador of an ethical approach to architecture. I will discuss Ruskin’s thoughts about the ethical dimension of specifically Indian architecture, which he laid down in a lecture given in early 1858. The second part is about the remarkable phenomenon of nawabi architecture, a hybrid “Indo-European” style, which was created by the Muslim rulers of the northern Indian province Awadh around 1800—a style which invariably led the British to respond with harsh criticism and strongly ethical concerns. In a third step, I will reconstruct the rise of the “Indo-Saracenic” style in India, a form of British colonial architecture which accompanied the rise of the so-called new imperialism in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Indo-Saracenic style is the architectural expression of an “imperial vision,” as Thomas Metcalf (Imperial Vision) calls it. Yet at the same time, this style can be understood as the manifestation of an “ethical vision.” It is perhaps one of the most rigorous attempts to encode “ethics in stone.” In my concluding remarks, I will come back to architectural theories of today and ask how the intersections of ethics and architecture can be conceptualized in face of the postmodern insights into the relativity of moral values and the semantic polyvalence of all art. 2. Cruel Ornaments: John Ruskin’s Lecture on the “Deteriorative Power of Indian Art and Architecture” at the Kensington Museum (1858) In a lecture given at the opening of the Architectural Museum at South Kensington on 13 January 1858, John Ruskin chose to speak about Indian art and architecture: _____________ 2

Notable recent work on the relation of ethics and architecture includes the 2002 special issue of Cross Currents called Architecture, Ethics, Eugenics, and the Construction of the Soul, as well as work by Pérez-Gómez; Pérez-Gómez and Pelletier; and Spector.

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It is quite true that the art of India is delicate and refined. But it has one curious character distinguishing it from all other art of equal merit in design––it never represents a natural fact. It either forms its compositions out of meaningless fragments of colour and flowings of line; or if it represents any living creature, it represents that creature under some distorted and monstrous form. To all the facts and forms of nature it wilfully and resolutely opposes itself; it will not draw a man, but an eight-armed monster; it will not draw a flower, but only a spiral or a zigzag. (Ruskin, “The Deteriorative Power” 265)

According to Ruskin, India had produced admirably refined art; but this art was flawed by what he perceived as its opposition to nature. “Unnatural” and “untruthful” artistic forms, as exemplified in the Oriental ornamentation and “much maligned monsters”3 of India’s art and architecture, were not merely aesthetic aberrations. Instead, any architectural style had to be understood as directly linked to the mind of its producer, his moral values, thus to national character, and from there, finally, to the rise or decline of nations. This concept of the link between art and ethics is of course already indicated by the title of Ruskin’s lecture, “the deteriorative power of conventional art over nations.” To Ruskin, art “in her own life and growth partly implies, partly secures, that of the nation in the midst of which she is practised.” And “untruthful” art “accelerates the ruin of the nation by which she is practised” (269). In the Kensington lecture we find a typically Ruskinian line of argument, which relates aesthetics and ethics by judging products of art with a view to the moral values of their producer.4 Ruskin’s theory of architecture found expression in two key works, which were written not long before his Kensington lecture and which have to be situated in the context of the Gothic Revival in England: The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851-1853). In those eminently influential works, Ruskin argued that beauty in architecture was only attainable if inspired by nature and that true artistic craftsmanship and its imperfections were to be preferred to a mechanized technical precision, which reduced the artist to a mere slave. According to Ruskin, it was the Gothic style which fulfilled both of these criteria and which was thus worthy of imitation. The conceptual fundament of the Kensington lecture can be traced back to The Stones of Venice, in which Ruskin claimed that the turn from Gothic to Renaissance styles in early-fifteenth-century Venetian architecture was an indication of the city’s moral decline. John Matteson observes that _____________ 3 4

See Mitter’s book of the same name. See also Harries, who explains that at the heart of Ruskin’s theory lies the “realization that the values of a society are inseparable from the art it produces. Architecture […] was responding to the culture that produced it. And since architecture is the most inescapable of visual arts, it is the most ubiquitous barometer of cultural malaise” (301).

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Ruskin’s purpose in The Stones of Venice as a whole was ethical. By observing the architecture of the city, he meant to illustrate the decline of Venice’s sense of taste and proportion to an allegedly parallel devolution in her public morals. The Stones of Venice illustrates how the choice of an architectural idiom can reflect and, in turn, help to determine the values of a citizenry. (297)

Ruskin’s ethics of architecture must be read against the backdrop of nineteenth-century industrialization with its standardization and routinized mass production. Moreover, his view of buildings was somewhat limited as he was primarily concerned with their surface ornamentation. Nevertheless, Ruskin’s writings were eminently influential for the Victorian vision of architecture and its ethical dimension.5 But back to the Kensington lecture: Interestingly, Ruskin does not only condemn Indian art but moreover constructs––in opposition to such “degenerate” architecture and national character––the image of the “artless” and yet “natural” Scotsman: “You will find upon reflection, that all the highest points of the Scottish character are connected with impressions derived straight from the natural scenery of their country” (266). Ruskin goes on to lecture his audience about the far-reaching consequences that the differences in Indian and Scottish national character imply: “You have, in these two nations, seen in direct opposition the effects on moral sentiment of art without nature, and of nature without art” (268). Great Indian art and architecture, Ruskin maintains, is a source of evil and national decline because it is not related to nature, it does not seek its grounding in reality and it thus does not seek truth. The simple, artless Scotsmen on the other hand, with their “peat cottages,” are a heroic and good people, because what they build or create seems to be directly derived from nature: Out of the peat cottage come faith, courage, self-sacrifice, purity, and piety, and whatever else is fruitful in the work of Heaven; out of the ivory palace [of India, A.E.] come treachery, cruelty, cowardice, idolatry, bestiality,––whatever else is fruitful in the work of Hell. (6)

This is an invocation of the “two paths,” between which—according to Ruskin—art and architecture can choose. As Ruskin asserts in the preface of the collection of essays called The Two Paths, which also features his _____________ 5

Their impact even extended (via Ruskin’s disciple William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement of the late nineteenth century) to international Modernism. Walter Gropius, for example, claimed to have been influenced by Ruskin’s writings. The ethical dimension of architectural styles was emphasized, much in Ruskin’s vein, by modernists as different as Herman Broch, Hans Sedlmayr and Ernst Bloch (cf. Harries 60). And even Giedion understands architecture as an “index” of social mores: “However much a period tries to disguise itself, its real nature will still show through in its architecture. […] It is as an unmistakable index to what is really going on in a period that architecture is indispensable when we are seeking to evaluate that period” (20).

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Kensington Lecture, “the way divides itself, one way leading to the Olive mountains—one to the vale of the Salt Sea” (“Preface” 254). Once more, therefore, Ruskin lectured his audience in early 1858 that art was related to ethical questions, to national character, and from there to the rise or decline of nations and cultural formations. But why, one may want to ask, did he resort for his argument to a comparison of “hellish Indian” and “heavenly Scottish” architecture? The answer is that Ruskin delivered his lecture at a significant moment, during the so-called Indian Mutiny. Since May 1857, the British had been fighting a great uprising in northern India—a revolt of Indian soldiers, peasants and princes, which seemed to jeopardize colonial rule in India. In January 1858 the fight was not over, but the British had regained power in the main centers of the revolt and were confident that they would soon subdue the rebels. Nevertheless, what had just reached another peak in the British press were atrocity stories about Indian cruelties and—at the same time—the fabrication of heroical myths about the British soldiers and civilians, who were involved “out there,” in India, in the fight against those “ungrateful” and apparently “uncivilized” subjects. One of these “Mutiny” stories is an entirely apocryphal anecdote about “Jessie Brown of Lucknow,” which had come into circulation in the British press around Christmas. It is the story of a young Scottish lass who is said to have been the first to hear the bagpipes of General Havelock’s Highland regiment, which was to relieve the besieged Residency of Lucknow, where the British had held out more than three months against the Indian rebels.6 Another example of the glorification of the Highland soldiers during the time of the “Mutiny” is Noel Paton’s painting In Memoriam, which was on display in the Royal Academy in May 1858. In the upper left one can see Highland soldiers entering a besieged home in order to rescue English women and children.7

_____________ 6 7

For the genesis and medial representations of the “Jessie Brown” myth see Erll, Prämediation–Remediation. See also Erll, “Re-Writing as Re-Visioning.” There are two versions of Paton’s painting. The first shows fiery-looking sepoys bursting through the door, thus conjuring up the atrocity stories about rape and mutilation of English victims. Because the British public found this version offensive, Paton changed it into the image reproduced above, thus alluding to yet another myth: that of the gallant Highland soldier. See Erll, Prämediation–Remediation; Erll, “Representing the ‘Indian Mutiny’”; and Thomas.

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Fig. 1: Noel Paton: “In Memoriam” (1858; oil on panel, 123 x 96.5 cm), private collection; by permission of http://www.the-athenaeum.org

“Gallant Highland soldiers versus cruel Indian mutineers” was therefore a culturally available and highly charged opposition at the time Ruskin delivered his Kensington lecture. Ruskin made use of this contrast derived from current imperial politics and turned it into a contrast of art: here the heroic Highlander who has no idea about art, there the refined Indian and

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his treachery. And indeed, Ruskin’s lecture not only dwells on the ethics of ornamental detail, but also echoes some of the most prevalent stereotypes of the contemporary British discourse about the “Mutiny”: Since the race of man began its course of sin on this earth, nothing has ever been done by it so significative of all bestial, and lower than bestial degradation, as the acts the Indian race in the year that has just passed by. […] But cruelty stretched to its fiercest against the gentle and unoffending, and corruption festered to its loathsomest in the midst of the witnessing presence of a disciplined civilization,—these we could not have known to be within the practicable compass of human guilt, but for the acts of the Indian mutineer. (“The Deteriorative Power” 262-3)

According to Ruskin, “sin,” “bestiality,” “cruelty,” “corruption”—the very characteristics of the path that leads to hell—can be found in individual mutineers, in the “Indian character” as such, and in Indian architecture: one being an expression of the other and all intensifying and reinforcing one another. India’s “abandoning of Nature,” its “fanciful ornamentation” and the mutineers’ “cruelty stretched to its fiercest”—artistic, individual and national degradation—therefore seem to the Victorian art critic to be closely, even causally, related. Ruskin’s lecture presents a specific solution for a deep ambivalence that the British felt towards Indian art. In fact, Ruskin had to admit that in the Kensington Museum he could see no exhibits “in their kind more admirable than the decorated works of India” (261). The tension between attraction and repulsion that Ruskin seems to have felt was resolved by the idea that Indian art may be artistically perfect, but was unrelated to nature, based on delusions, and therefore ethically dubious. In the following, I will discuss two other British ways of coping with the “ethical menace” of aesthetically alluring Indian art forms. Before I turn to the development of the Indo-Saracenic style in the late nineteenth century, a kind of “‘proactive solving” of this problem by incorporating Indian elements into British building, I will take a look at a phenomenon of the early nineteenth century, which, to the British, was even worse than Indian architecture: the Indian appropriation of European architecture. This form of cultural exchange took place in Lucknow, the capital of the northern Indian province Awadh (today Uttar Pradesh), the very place where the “Indian Mutiny” was to break out half a century later. 3. Ethics and Aesthetics of the Indo-European Style: Nawabi Architecture in Colonial Lucknow Until the mid-nineteenth century, when it was seized by the British, Lucknow was a major Indian metropolis and the location of a widely fa-

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mous nawabi culture. The nawabs were a dynasty which had come from Nishapur in north-eastern Iran in the early eighteenth century and turned Lucknow into a vital Indian center of Shi’ism. Lucknow was a cosmopolitan city, welcoming immigrants from all over India, and also Europeans, many of whom were rich nabobs—adventurers who had assumed an Oriental way of life. In the early nineteenth century, with the decline of the Mughal court of Delhi, poets, artists, musicians and craftsmen virtually flocked to Lucknow, which offered them a uniquely liberal environment. Even today, Lakhnavi culture is proverbial.8 In Lucknow people spoke the most refined Urdu; poetry blossomed; the popular Parsi theatre (which was to significantly influence Indian film around 1900) has its roots in Lucknow’s Urdu theatre. Closely associated with the court were also the famous “courtesans of Lucknow,” who played a major part in the development of advanced dance forms and Hindustani music.9 This heyday of Lakhnavi culture was also accompanied by architectural innovations. With the help of European architects working at their courts, the immensely rich and Anglophile nawabs—such as Asaf-ud-Daula (17751797), Sadat Ali Khan (1798-1814) and Wajid Ali Shah (1847-1856)–– created entire new quarters, especially along the banks of the river Goomti. Lucknow architecture was a fusion: There were Persian-inspired buildings, Mughal architecture, European-style palaces, Roman, Grecian, Egyptian styles, and even elements of Chinoiserie, the integration of Chinese forms, a fashion that had come to northern India via Great Britain. Sometimes one would find all these styles in a single building. And not only styles, but even the layouts of specific buildings were copied in Lucknow: Sadat Ali Khan’s Dilkusha Palace is an almost exact replica of a Northumberland country house, and Asaf-ud-Dazla’s Rumi Darwaza arch was said to be a copy of a famous arch in Istanbul.10 In Lucknow’s nawabi architecture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries one therefore encounters, as Dalrymple emphasizes, a “unique moment of Indo-European intermingling,” a “fusion,” and a “moment pregnant with unfulfilled possibilities” (50-51).

_____________ 8

9 10

See Graff: “[…] it was a rich culture that made Lucknow distinctive, and gave a special meaning to the adjective Lakhnavi. Used pejoratively, this term suggests foppishness, fastidiousness, mannerist behaviour, reflected in costume and over-elaborate etiquette—the idle preoccupations of a powerless aristocracy with a surfeit of enforced leisure” (5). On Lucknow’s history and culture see Graff; Llewellyn-Jones, A Fatal Friendship; and Dalrymple. On Lucknow’s nawabi architecture see Metcalf, An Imperial Vision; Llewelyn-Jones, A Fatal Friendship.

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There were some English admirers of Lucknow, such as Fanny Parkes Parlby, the famous traveler “in search of the picturesque”11, and the war journalist William Russell. Many European travelers somehow felt reminded of home and compared Lucknow with Constantinople, Naples, Rome, St Petersburg, and Dresden (cf. Llewellyn-Jones, “Lucknow” 62). However, for the most part British reactions to the architecture of Lucknow ranged from bewilderment to outright rejection. Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, the expert on the history of Lucknow, quotes some of these negative reactions: The British found Lucknow architecture an “unutterable degradation,” “all very degenerate,” and saw in it “a grotesque grace,” “ridiculous absurdities” and an “execrable taste” (Llewellyn-Jones ix, 234). Comparisons with Sodom and Gomorrah moreover point to the fact that Lucknow architecture was understood as an expression of the values of the nawabi court. Just like their most renowned architectural critic, the Victorians drew analogies between Lucknow’s “decadent” buildings and the supposed degeneracy of its rulers. Even the famous Henry Lawrence, who was to die during the revolt in Lucknow and would enter the pantheon of British “Mutiny” heroes, stated in the Calcutta Review of 1845: “Brilliant and picturesque as Lucknow now is, there still is a puerility and want of stability about it, characteristic enough of its monarchs” (375). Precisely how these monarchs appeared to British eyes becomes clear as we turn to William H. Sleeman, one of the British residents of Lucknow, who wrote in his memoirs: “Such a scene of intrigue, corruption, depravity and neglect of duty and abuse of authority I have never before been placed in and I hope never again to undergo” (2: 411).

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See Parlby’s Indian travel diary of the same name: Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque (1850).

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Fig. 2: Claude Martin’s Constantia (La Martinière), built in 1795 (photographer: John Edward Saché) (http://www.harappa.com)

Such accusations of decadence extended to all those who worked and lived in the amazing contact zone of Lucknow. The most famous architect in the city was the French nabob Claude Martin. His palace mausoleum Constantia (or La Martinière, as it was later called; cf. fig. 2) is described by an anonymous source of 1816 as “a striking monument of folly” and its ornamentation as “the heterogeneous fancies of a diseased brain” (Llewellyn-Jones, “Lucknow” 58). But the Lucknow building most frequently, and most critically, commented upon is certainly Wajid Ali Shah’s Qaisar Bagh (or Chota Mian), built in 1848-50 (cf. fig. 3). This large structure was the last nawab’s palace. In a tourist guide of 1911—written by an Indian author, but clearly intended for the British market—it is called the “largest, grandest and most debased of all the Lucknow palaces” (Beg 63). Another tourist guide, published in the 1930s, is even more explicit about the ethics and aesthetics of the building, when it states that “judged from an architectural view-point the result is a gigantic failure; it could hardly be otherwise, considering the indolent and flabby nature of its parent Wajid Ali Shah” (qtd. in Llewellyn-Jones, Fatal Friendship 240). Dr. A. Führer, the curator of the Lucknow provincial museum (and re-

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sponsible for the demolition of many nawabi buildings) wrote in 1891 that the later nawabi structures, and above all the Qaisar Bagh, were the most debased examples of architecture to be found in India […]. All the mongrel vulgarities which were applied in Vauxhall, Rosherville and the Surrey Gardens took refuge in the Kaiser Bagh and Chatar Manzil when expelled from thence, as, for instance, Corinthian pilasters under Muslim domes, false venetian blinds, imitation marbles, pea-green mermaids sprawling over a blue sky under a yellow entablature, etc. […] Nowhere can we see more markedly the influence of a depraved oriental court and its politics upon art and architecture than in Lucknow. (Qtd. in Metcalf, Imperial Vision 111)

Such a comparison of notorious places of London working-class entertainment with Lucknow nawabi buildings serves of course to show that the Indian rulers’ taste was uneducated, their royal character merely pleasureseeking, and their architecture nothing but a cheap imitation.12

Fig. 3: Wajid Ali Shah’s Qaisar Bagh (Chota Mian), built in 1848-50; Illustrated London News 1859

_____________ 12

For the “pea-green mermaids sprawling over a blue sky under a yellow entablature” gate, see the Mermaid Gate of the Qaisar Bagh in fig. 4.

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Fig. 4: Qaisar Bagh: Mermaid Gate (photographer: Samuel Bourne); by permission of the British Library

The very vehemence of the British criticism that was unleashed upon the Lakhnavi hybrid architecture—a mixed and playful style that reminds one very much of postmodern aesthetics13—can be understood as a typical pattern of coping with colonial “mimicry” as it has been studied by Homi Bhabha and other postcolonial critics: The integration of European aesthetic forms into Indian architecture seems to have been interpreted by the colonizers as a repetition and display of the values that were originally encoded in these Western forms. In this perspective, the reckless appropriation and relocation of architectural patterns appears as an attempt to de-center and destabilize the colonizers’ aesthetical and ethical properties. This aspect of mimicry, the fact that Lucknow architecture seemed— in Homi Bhabha’s words—“not quite,” and therefore certainly “not right,” extended also to the materials used. The province of Awadh lacked building stone; therefore its builders “developed the art of mimicking _____________ 13

I will discuss this “postmodern” dimension of hybrid architectural styles and their ethical implications in my conclusion.

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stone by using small thin lakhori bricks, which were then covered in fine stucco” (Llewellyn-Jones, “Lucknow” 55). Moreover, pottery was used to imitate stone, and especially marble.14 Again, for many British this “sham,” this literal hollowness, for example of the gilded domes which were actually shells of wood, was easily transferred to the Lucknow rulers’ lifestyle and moral make-up. The British reactions to the architecture of Lucknow are a striking example of the possibilities and pitfalls of the––very Ruskinian––practice of linking the aesthetics of architecture with its alleged ethics. According to Llewellyn-Jones, “Lucknow is perhaps the only city in the world whose buildings were anthropomorphized to the extent that they were believed to resemble the very character of their builders” (“Lucknow” 62f.). This anthropomorphization was, of course, not merely a reaction that otherwise disinterested Western critics resorted to in the face of an unsettling aesthetic experience. It was, as Metcalf and others have argued, politically highly charged: “The very vehemence of the criticism in fact revealed its political objectives: to help the British convince themselves that the nawabs were utterly degenerate and so deserved their ultimate fate” (Metcalf, Imperial Vision 111). The amused interjections and outraged exclamations of the British visitors of Lucknow quoted above must therefore all be understood to have contributed in one way or another to the verdict of “despotism,” which was seen to be evident in Indian architecture as well as in the character of its rulers—and which provided the British time and again with the legitimation to seize the Indians’ land and establish their own, allegedly “more civilized” rule. Indian “despotism,” which was seen to manifest itself in the nawabs’ lifestyle, political actions and architecture alike, made the British annexation of Awadh in 1856 and the expulsion of its rulers appear as a moral duty. This annexation (among other factors) led to the “Indian Mutiny.” Interestingly, if one looks at the British comments about nawabi architecture quoted above one realizes that those which were made after the end of the revolt in 1858 are even more vehement than those made before the “Mutiny.” Even retrospectively, it seems, the British sought to legitimize their seizure not only from a power-politics viewpoint but also from the perspective of ethics and aesthetics. _____________ 14

Cf. the report of a visitor of Lucknow in 1915: “A nearer view of these buildings destroys all the illusion. The ‘lamp of truth’ burnt but dimly for the architects of Lucknow. You find, on examination, that the white colour of the buildings which presented in the sunlight the effect of the purest marble, is simply whitewash, the material of the buildings themselves is stuccoed brick; and your taste is shocked by the discovery that the gilded domes, of perfect shape and apparently massive construction […] are mere shells of wood, in many places rotten.” (Qtd. in Llewellyn-Jones, Fatal Friendship 238)

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Fig. 5: Felice Beato’s photography of the destroyed Lucknow (The “Baillie Guard,”, 1858); by permission of George Eastman House

In early 1858 British troops almost entirely destroyed the city of Lucknow. This process was well documented by the war photographer Felice Beato, who took more than sixty pictures of Lucknow at that time (cf. fig. 5). The British soldiers certainly had tactical reasons to demolish many of the grand nawabi buildings, as this allowed easier troop movement and an effective defense of the recently reconquered city. But this operation also smacks of a cleansing, of the strategic removal of those buildings which were understood as expressions of decadence, vulgarity and, ultimately, insubordination and cruelty. 4. An “Ethical Vision”: The Rise of the Indo-Saracenic Style After the “Indian Mutiny” the British developed their own hybrid fusion of architecture. In a sense, they invented a counter-model to Lucknow and its Indo-European style. The colonizers’ hybrid is called Indo-Saracenic

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style, and it is an architectural phenomenon of the late nineteenth century. Just like its early-nineteenth-century counterpart, the Indo-Saracenic style is a fascinating example of the negotiation of ethics and power politics in the medium of architecture––and via the cultural exchange of aesthetic features. What the British found in India (or thought they had found) were essentially two different architectural styles. In nineteenth-century diction, these were “Hindoo architecture” on the one hand and the so-called “Saracenic” style (referring to Muslim forms) on the other. This division is of course typical of the way in which the British colonial order of knowledge introduced strict distinctions that Indians would not have drawn at that time (namely between Hindu and Muslim cultures)––distinctions which played a not unimportant role in the communal tensions, the riots and the final division of India and Pakistan in 1947.15 With regard to Hindu architecture the British were quick to draw analogies between what they saw as a failure of aesthetics and an unacceptable religion and value system. Thomas Metcalf explains: “As the British disdained the ‘idolatrous’ Hindu religion so too inevitably did they disdain the ‘Hindu’ architectural styles that, in their view, expressed its values in stone” (Imperial Vision 57). What the British called “Saracenic architecture,” Muslim buildings especially of the Mughal era, seemed less strange, because the British were familiar with such structures from Southern Europe and the Near East. But the British admiration of Saracenic styles was also mingled with fear. Like all things Oriental, it seemed to reek of cruelty and to express a menace to British rule.16

_____________ 15 16

For the British colonial order of knowledge see Cohn; Metcalf, Ideologies. For the dynamics of Orientalism see Said; for Orientalism with regard to architecture see also MacKenzie.

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Fig. 6: Calcutta Government House, South Front (photographer: Samuel Bourne); by permission of George Eastman House

In this Indian architectural landscape, which was painstakingly surveyed by the British, the colonial masters planted their own buildings: In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century classical Greek and Roman styles predominated. This choice is certainly due to a more general classic revival in European architecture at that time. But the practice of building in a classical mode continued for a much longer time in British India; it extended well into the first half of the nineteenth century, when tastes had already changed in Europe. What Roman and Grecian styles seem to express in the colonies––and what therefore made them such a long-lasting preference of colonial architecture in India—was a British self-image as powerful emperors.17 Classical buildings in India were meant to evoke the conquests of Alexander and Caesar. One of the most striking examples of this kind of architecture is the Calcutta Government house, which was erected in 1803 and actually modeled after a country residence in Derbyshire (fig. 6). Buildings like the Calcutta Government House conveyed a kind of “ordered beauty” which was meant to be beneficent for the “uncivilized” colonial subjects. Classical styles of architecture in British India were therefore also part of the liberal project of transforming Indian society according to the European model, a project which would find its most famous expression in Macaulay’s Minute on Indian Education of 1835. Not _____________ 17

On colonial architecture see also Morris.

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only literature, therefore, but also architecture was understood to be a medium which could transmit Western values. But the liberal and utilitarian view of Indian society and its future changed radically after the revolt of 1857.18 And interestingly, at this historical and ideological turning point the British style of colonial architecture also changed. After the “Indian Mutiny,” the informal empire, controlled for more than a hundred years by the East India Company, was transformed into the formal Empire under the British crown. Victoria was made “Empress of India” in 1876. At the same time, the once liberal “ideologies of the Raj” were substituted by a conservative credo: The British constructed an unsurpassable difference between Europe and India––civilization on the one hand and an utterly uncivilized (and uncivilizable) people on the other. In consequence, there ostensibly arose for the British crown the “moral necessity” to govern the Indian people, which would otherwise sink into deepest chaos.19 After the “Indian Mutiny,” the British fashioned themselves as the only rulers over India who could manage a vast country sunk into disorder. They presented themselves as just, historically necessary and legitimate, almost indigenous, rulers, who were the natural successors of the Mughal empire—only less despotic—and who could make the antagonistic communities of Muslims and Hindus live together in peace. The architectural expression of this ideology—and philosophy of history—is the Indo-Saracenic style: a strange mixture of Hindu and Muslim architectural forms with European elements (especially of the Gothic revival) and building techniques, which was developed in the decades following the revolt. Metcalf describes the Indo-Saracenic style as a “‘blended’ style that brought formerly antagonistic communities together to live in amity under the direction of a wise ruler” (Imperial Vision 52): The “mixed” Indo-saracenic style ideally suited the British vision of their colonial role in India. By drawing together and then melding forms distinctly labeled “Hindu” and “Saracenic,” the British saw themselves, the self-proclaimed masters of India’s culture, as shaping a harmony the Indians alone, communally divided, could not achieve. (75)

The ethical dimension of the Indo-Saracenic style can be best observed in educational buildings such as Mayo College in Ajmer, which was named after Lord Mayo, Viceroy of India from 1869 to 1872 (fig. 7). Mayo College was a kind of English boarding school for Rajput princes. With schools like these, the British model of disseminating the values of Empire was transferred to India: The school was to provide training in self_____________ 18 19

For the different ideologies of the Raj see Metcalf, Ideologies. See Metcalf, Ideologies.

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reliance, moral duty and team spirit in order to make a young ruling elite fit for their service to the Empire. Lord Mayo’s foreign secretary brought this point home when he wrote that in this way the young rulers could escape the “fawning parasitism, inseparable in the East from rank and coming power” (qtd. in Metcalf, Imperial Vision 68).

Fig. 7: Mayo College, Ajmer (http://ajmer.nic.in/edu.html)

Mayo College displays many of the key characteristics of the blended Indo-Saracenic style: It features Mughal-style cusped arches, the Bengali (or ‘drooping’) chattris, which were understood as typically Hindu, an overhanging chajja from the pre-Mughal era, various cupolas, and two octagonal minarets (a Muslim element, of course) topped by Hindu Shikra domes.20 What this architectural fusion displays is the British mastery of both the Muslim and the Hindu styles of India. But it also shows an order and a technical as well as “scientific” perfection which were understood as the key values of Empire. Strangely though, above the whole structure of Mayo College rises a clock tower––an entirely alien element which one would not have found in any kind of Indian architecture at that time. Yet after the “Mutiny,” not _____________ 20

Cf. Metcalf, Imperial Vision 76.

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only Mayo College, but many other educational buildings had such clock towers added. The symbolism––ethical and political––of such an architectural detail is evident: The clock is an element of the “new era” of British rule in India. It stands for the fight against the (according to the British, typically Indian) traits of laziness and lethargy. The ethics of discipline, orderliness and punctuality were thus added to the architectural structure of educational buildings in India. Moreover, the open iron dome above the clock looks like a crown, thus symbolizing the power of the Raj. And there is yet another, powerfully symbolic aspect connected with this “crown.” It is made out of the relatively new material steel. Steel and concrete in fact became important building materials in late-nineteenthcentury colonial India. They signified modernity and solidity—especially when compared, for example, with the “sham” and the “hollowness” of Lucknow’s building materials. But not only colleges and schools had clock towers added. From the 1860s onwards the British erected such towers, very often free standing, in many major cities of India. The clock tower of Delhi was called one of the first “improvements” of the city after the devastation of the “Mutiny”.21 Perhaps not surprisingly, there is also one in Lucknow, which was erected in the 1880s. The Lucknow tower was constructed in the Moorish style (in India a variation of the Indo-Saracenic style) and placed adjacent to the burial ground of one of Lucknow’s former nawabi rulers, Mohammed Ali Shah. His mausoleum, the Husainabad or Chota Imambara, was built in 1837 and it is a great example of the hybrid nawabi architecture of the early nineteenth century. Ironically, the Lucknow clock tower (easily recognized as a Qutb Minar—a victory tower—of the British) was not even financed by the colonial power; instead, the colonial masters convinced the Indian trustees of the Husainabad Endowment—a charitable body established by the former rulers of Awadh—to cover the costs of the building. In the center of Lucknow, therefore, the two hybrid architectural styles meet and their contrast also bespeaks the contest of power and moral values that had raged in colonial India for almost a hundred years—and found expression in the medium of architecture.

_____________ 21

The Builder 1874, qtd. in Metcalf, Imperial Vision 78.

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5. Conclusion: Architecture, Hybridity, and the Dissemination of Values in Cultural Context Today, it is a commonplace to note that ethical and aesthetical considerations have been put to the service of ideology and power politics;22 and, if anywhere, one would suspect such a link in a nineteenth-century imperial context. What the different architectural styles of nineteenth-century India and the discourses about their ethical dimension reveal, is, first of all, just such a relation of imperial ideologies, power politics and an aesthetic medium which was understood to represent cultural values. Yet apart from this recognition that the architecture of the Raj can serve as a historical case study which provides intriguing insights into a fascinating cultural contact zone and the ethical negotiations that took place in the medium of architecture—can its study also yield insights of a more general kind into the phenomenon of “ethics within culture” and the dissemination of values in artistic media, such as architecture? Given the present-day understanding of the relativity of ethics and aesthetics, an approach such as Ruskin’s and the British in India is surely not tenable any more. But current architectural theory is still concerned with values. How values are expressed and disseminated through public buildings, urban development, design and also in the context of building in postcolonial spaces are apparently very pressing questions even today. Production-oriented approaches such as Ruskin’s (or Le Corbusier’s or Giedion’s) tend to a somewhat naïve, monocausal, and (as we have seen) politically easily exploitable mapping of architectural forms to cultural values. What an ethics of architecture would have to take into account, therefore, is all three dimensions of the architectural process: the production, the artwork itself and its forms, and its reception and various functionalizations—and, as this article has shown, the cultural contexts in which all three of them are located. What can literary theory, and especially the articles collected in this volume, contribute to an understanding of the ethical function of architecture? British buildings in India are an example of a fairly open and intentional dissemination of values in the medium of architecture—in Grabes’s and Locatelli’s sense. This is what the historical sources quoted above testify to. British architecture was meant to “speak” to the colonial subjects. The buildings of the Raj had an ethical dimension because the colonizers made deliberate use of architectural forms that were understood to be semantically highly charged: There is the semanticization of the styles resorted to (first classicism, then the hybrid fusion of Hindu and _____________ 22

See, for example, Norris.

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Muslim styles), of materials used (e.g. steel), and of specific design elements (e.g. clock towers, crown-like domes). The case of Indian architecture in Lucknow is more difficult to assess. As far as the British side is concerned, it is an example of an “ethical reading” of architecture, and thus of a medium’s dissemination of values not so much on the level of artistic production, but on the level of crosscultural reception. The Indian builders and their patrons themselves, on the other hand, did not leave any record of their views about their own hybrid architecture. Llewellyn-Jones (“Lucknow” 61) guesses that a combination of nawabi self-fashioning (by adapting the styles of those in power) and a playful wish to create a “museum” lay at the heart of the hybrid structures found in Lucknow. With its eclecticism, arbitrariness, and its practice of not taking its historical sources very seriously, the nawabi architecture of Lucknow produces a strange anachronism for today’s viewers: It appears uncannily postmodern. Drawing on those contributions in the present volume of essays which focus on the ethics of literary works, especially with regard to the postmodern period (e.g., Locatelli, Shusterman, Neumann), the nawabi buildings’ hybridity could be argued to have an ethical function in itself. Indeed, the architecture of Lucknow is an exercise in aesthetic alterity; with its structures that can certainly be called “agrammatical” (cf. Shusterman in this volume) in architectural terms, it must have had a defamiliarizing effect on both English and Indian onlookers.23 But whether such an experience of architectural alterity, of ornamental and symbolic plurality, if such a display of the sheer impossibility of closure in the medium of architecture led nineteenth-century viewers to experience and reevaluate their own ethical and aesthetical categories and concepts, is more than questionable. The architecture of the Raj alerts us to the importance of considering the contextual dimension in all theorizing about “ethics within culture.” Aesthetic forms and ethical functions cannot be mapped; cultural contexts of production and reception have to be taken into account. Indian as well as British building in India was eclectic and hybrid, and so is postmodern architecture. Yet all three styles seem to be connected with entirely different ethical functions. However, as architecture (just like the literary text) belongs to the more stable media which have the power to survive the passage of time, its ethical dimension is subject to change. Different ethical content may be attributed to the medium by different generations. It is _____________ 23

Postmodern theories of architecture operate with categories similar to those used in literary studies. See, for example, Pérez-Gómez: “The most authentic modern architecture […] is meaningful precisely not by functioning as a sign; like poetry it operates against prosaic or scientific language” (206).

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the reception-oriented idea of an “ethical experience” (cf. Locatelli), the focus on the meaning-making process of readers and viewers (who may be located in different historical times and cultures), which opens up the possibility of thinking about the relation of ethics and aesthetics as an inherently dynamic and variable one.

References Beg, Mirza Amir. The Guide to Lucknow: Containing Popular Places and Buildings Worthy of a Visit, with Historical Notes on Mutiny of 1857: Also a Brief Description on the History of Agra, Delhi, Hardwar, Allahabad. Lucknow: n.pag., 1911. Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Men: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” October 28 (1984): 125-33. Capon, David Smith. Architectural Theory. 2 vols. Chichester: Wiley, 1999. Cohn, Bernard. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996. Dalrymple, William. The Age of Kali: Indian Travels and Encounters. London: Harper Collins, 1998. Erll, Astrid. Prämediation—Remediation: Repräsentationen des indischen Aufstands in imperialen und post-kolonialen Medienkulturen (von 1857 bis zur Gegenwart). Trier: WVT, 2007. —: “Representing the ‘Indian Mutiny’ in Imperial and Postcolonial Media Cultures.” Anglistentag 2005 Bamberg: Proceedings. Eds. Christoph Houswitschka, Gabriele Knappe and Anja Müller. Trier: WVT, 2006. 39-55. —: “Re-writing as Re-visioning: Modes of Representing the ‘Indian Mutiny’ in British Literature, 1857 to 2000.” Literature and the Production of Cultural Memory. Eds. Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney. EJES (European Journal of English Studies) 10.2 (2006): 163-85. Giedion, Sigfried. Time, Space and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition. 1941. 5th ed. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1967. Graff, Violette, ed. Lucknow: Memories of a City. 1997. 3rd ed. Delhi: Oxford UP, 2004. Harries, Karsten. The Ethical Function of Architecture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997. Lawrence, Henry. “The Kingdom of Oude.” Calcutta Review 3.6 (1845): 375-427. Llewellyn-Jones, Rosie. A Fatal Friendship: The Nawabs, the British, and the City of Lucknow. Delhi: Oxford UP, 1985.

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—: “Lucknow, City of Dreams.” Lucknow: Memories of a City. Ed. Violette Graff. 1997. 3rd ed. Delhi: Oxford UP, 2004. 49-66. MacKenzie, John. Orientalism, History, Theory, and the Arts. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995. Matteson, John. “Constructing Ethics and the Ethics of Construction: John Ruskin and the Humanity of the Builder.” Cross Currents 52.3 (2002): 294-303. Metcalf, Thomas R. Ideologies of the Raj. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. —: An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and the British Raj. London: Faber, 1989. Mitter, Partha. Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art. Oxford: Clarendon, 1977. Morris, Jan. Stones of Empire: The Buildings of the Raj. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1983. Norris, Christopher. Truth and the Ethics of Criticism. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1994. Parlby, Fanny Parkes. Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque, During Four-and-Twenty Years in the East: With Revelations of Life in the Zenana. London: Pelham Richardson, 1850. Pérez-Gómez, Alberto. Built upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics. Cambridge: MIT P, 2006. Pérez-Gómez, Alberto, and Louise Pelletier, eds. Architecture, Ethics and Technology. Buffalo: McGill-Queens UP, 1994. Ruskin, John. “The Deteriorative Power of Conventional Art Over Nations. An Inaugural Lecture, Delivered at the Kensington Museum, January, 1858.” 1859. ‘A Joy For Ever’ and The Two Paths with Letters on the Oxford Museum and Various Addresses 1856-1860. 1859. Eds. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. London: George Allen 1905. 259-292. —: “Preface.” 1859. ‘A Joy For Ever’ and The Two Paths with Letters on the Oxford Museum and Various Addresses 1856-1860. 251-254. —: The Seven Lamps of Architecture. 1849. New York: Dutton, 1907. —: The Stones of Venice. 1851-53. New York: Collier, 1900. —: The Two Paths: Being Lectures on Art, and its Application to Decoration and Manufacture, Delivered in 1858-59. 1859. New York: Wiley, 1872. Said, Edward. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. Sleeman, William Henry. A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude in 1849/50. 2 vols. London: Bentley, 1858. Spector, Tom. The Ethical Architect: The Dilemma of Contemporary Practice. New York: Princeton Architectural, 2001.

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Stevens, Brin, ed. Architecture, Ethics, Eugenics, and the Construction of the Soul. Spec. issue of Cross Currents 52.3 (2002). Thomas, Julia. Pictorial Victorians: The Inscription of Values in Word and Image. Athens: Ohio UP, 2004. Wasserman, Barry, Patrick Sullivan, and Gregory Palermo. Ethics and the Practice of Architecture. New York: Wiley, 2000.

ANSGAR NÜNNING & JAN RUPP (GIESSEN)

The Dissemination of Imperialist Values in Late Victorian Literature and Other Media 1. Introduction: Metaphors—Narratives—Imperialist Values Today, one would be hard-pressed to discern anything ethically-valuable connected with the British Empire.1 Yet, like many other European colonial powers, this was often how the British saw their empire: “the British Empire is under Providence the greatest instrument for good that the world has seen.”2 It was above all the metaphorical construction of the Empire as a family, with Queen Victoria in her triple role of empress, queen and “mother of her people” (Strachey 383), which generated a highly effective and ethically binding rhetoric of almost natural unity where this unity was anything but natural. For the colonies to oppose British rule did not simply mean to demand their just right to rule themselves, but to rebel as colonial children against the imperial mother-country, ruled just like themselves by the “Great White Mother” (Fredeman 8). The family, and the Victorian family in particular, is probably the strongest ethical institution of all. In fact, in philosophical usage, the concept of ethics tends to be intimately linked to the family and other closeknit relations: “Ethics […] guides our thick relations” (Margalit 37), which are “grounded in attributes such as parent, friend, lover, fellow-countryman” (7), while “[m]orality […] ought to guide our behavior toward […] our thin relations” (37), which are “in general our relations to the stranger and the remote” (7). The image of the imperial family and its concomitant values not only pervade the popular rhetoric of the time. They also recur, with nigh uncanny regularity, in late Victorian literature, although to note that they also recur in literature is somewhat understating the constitutive, rather than merely reflective, role of literature in colonial and imperialist discourse. From colonial discourse theory to the precepts of New Historicism, much has been said about the—more than mimetic—relationship between culture and imperialism, between discourses and power structures, converg_____________ 1 2

For a prominent exception, see Ferguson: “there seems a plausible case that the Empire enhanced global welfare—in other words, was a Good Thing” (XXIII). Lord Curzon, quoted in Ferguson (XXIII).

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ing on a constructivist understanding of literature in the “making [of] imperial mentalities” (Mangan). The “system of ideological fictions” (Said, Orientalism 321)—the beliefs, feelings, ideas and values through which the West not only imagined but ultimately also felt justified to conquer the East—was conceived and disseminated not least by literary narratives and fictions. These two types of (ideological and literary) fictions existed in close contiguity with each other, as can be expressed by the fruitfully ambiguous phrase “fictions of empire” (V. Nünning/A. Nünning).3 Metaphors of empire,4 such as the “Empire as a family,” are a prime example here, because they appeared in aesthetic as well as everyday contexts, and across a wide range of genres and media. Like any fiction of empire, they not only reflected imperial mentalities, but served to conceptualize the relationship between England and the colonies in the first place. The various ways that this process was inflected with a debate over values will be the subject of this article, starting from the thesis that the relations of empire were warranted and maintained not least through an aura of unassailability derived from the thick relations of the family, which assumed that neither unity could be broken easily. In arguing this thesis, we will first turn to the historical challenge that metaphors of empire and the values communicated by them responded to. What Elizabeth Ermath observes about the representation of social order in nineteenth-century narratives, viz. that the unity of empire was “not a reality to be reflected, but a problem to be solved” (125), applies equally, we suggest, to the language of popular imperialism. While it seems obvious that imperialism was eulogized in and for the colonial world as a noble cause—as the “White Man’s Burden” (Kipling) to civilize peripheral peoples—, a good part of the ideological fictions proliferating in Victorian literature is geared towards alleviating doubts and fears in the metropolitan center, too. _____________ 3

4

The phrase “fictions of empire” plays on the meaning(s) of fiction as, on the one hand, “[t]hat which, or something that, is imaginatively invented” or, more specifically, “[t]he species of literature which is concerned with the narration of imaginary events and the portraiture of imaginary characters,” viz. “[a] work of fiction; a novel or tale.” On the other hand, ‘fiction’ refers to “any supposition known to be at variance with fact, but conventionally accepted for some reason of practical convenience, conformity with traditional usage, decorum, or the like.” See Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “fiction.” The term is first used in A. Nünning, “Das Britische Weltreich als Familie” and “Metaphors of Empire.” Metaphors of empire are those by which the Empire itself was described, as opposed to metaphors simply used in some connection or other with imperialism. For the latter, see MacDonald’s (1994) overview of metaphors of popular imperialism, such as the “metaphor of war as sport—and its corollary, sport as war” (20). MacDonald’s study does not explore metaphors of empire more specifically, though.

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2. An Empire “of the Mind”: The “Problem” of Unity Given the aplomb of late nineteenth-century high imperialism, it is a familiar paradox that running through the history of the British Empire was a subcurrent of unease, often with the very term or notion of empire itself. Not only did “we conquer […] and people […] half the world in a fit of absence of mind,” in John Robert Seeley’s memorable dictum (Seeley 10). Even as late as 1905 Joseph Chamberlain insisted: It is not an empire. We use that word; but it is not an empire in the sense in which other empires have existed on this globe. It is not an empire in the sense in which the German empire now dominates a great portion of Europe. (in Boyd 295)

The negative connotations of the term, suggesting military conquest, tyranny, and despotism, not least historical examples of ultimate decline from the Roman to the Ottoman empires, all seemed to bode ominously. Apart from such global doubts, however, it was the particular example and specific fabric of the British Empire that remained an issue of concern. In his widely read treatise on empire, Oceana, or England and her Colonies, James Anthony Froude observed that “the spell which can unite all these communities into one has not yet been discovered” (2).5 Froude’s use of theological imagery shows just how important the question of the unity of empire was thought to be: “But holding an empire together is a moment to us which cannot be measured. […] In theological language, it is the saving of the souls of millions of Englishmen hereafter to be born, that is really at stake” (388). Froude was by no means the only Victorian writer in search of such a spell, as the plethora of sources dealing with the vexed problem of the unity of the Empire amply demonstrates. Curiously enough, many writers were careful to avoid the word “empire” altogether, referring to it in florid terms instead, to make up for the overall ambivalence and elusiveness they were faced with. The spell which was found often took the form of metaphors. In his The Expansion of England, John Robert Seeley opined that the word empire was an inadequate designation for the relationship between England and her colonies: “The word Empire seems too military and despotic to suit the relation of a mother-country to colonies” (44). According to Seeley’s peculiar but telling reasoning, colonization was some kind of organic process, similar to natural growth rather than military conquest. Like many of his contemporaries, Seeley resorts to similes and metaphors whenever he tries to account for the special relationship between England and her _____________ 5

For a more detailed discussion of Froude’s treatise, see Neumann.

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colonies. In doing so, he was providing answers to a question that is explicitly raised in John Davidson’s eclogue The Twenty-Fourth of May: Nobler than empire—word Ill-omened, out of date!— What name shall be conferred On England’s Ocean-state? (269)

A discussion of the metaphors that writers conferred on the Empire may shed light not only on the answers that Victorian culture gave to this question, but also on the way the British Empire was discursively constructed, how it was given shape, meaning and value. The main reason why metaphors are so important is that the ideological fictions of imperialism find their most succinct expression in conventional images, plotlines, and myths that support and legitimize the imperial project.6 In the process, metaphors of empire constructed and disseminated a highly normative set of imperialist values, which, rather than being idle idealist musings, essentially demanded obedience and observance. By looking at metaphors of empire, which impacted on a wide range of genres and media from political speeches and cartoons to poetry and even cultural performances,7 it is possible to illuminate how the British Empire was conceptualized not only politically, then, but also in terms of certain values, ethical codes, and rules of conduct. This article argues that metaphors of empire played a significant part in providing what Froude called “the spell which can unite all these communities into one” and that it was the ethically charged metaphor of the Empire as a family that served as the foremost unifying device. Metaphors of empire were all the more powerful in that they not only appeared in conjunction with literary narratives and fictions, but—metaphors serving as “mininarrations” (Eubanks 437)—encapsulated narratives themselves, thus projecting narrative coherence onto the rupture of conquest and colonial rule. Although Sullivan (3) has observed that the “metaphor of the empire as a ‘family’ was part of a colonial construct of British imperialism in India,” the ideo_____________ 6

7

For the relevance of metaphors for the the history of mentalities, see Burke: “Dennoch kann es für die Beschreibung der Unterschiede zwischen Mentalitäten sehr nützlich sein, sich an die wiederkehrenden Metaphern zu halten, insbesondere wenn sie das Denken insgesamt zu strukturieren scheinen” (139-140). For a discussion of how the metaphor of the imperial family was adduced to stage Victorian rituals of state such as Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, see Nünning/Rupp, “Königin Viktorias Thronjubiläen.” See also Chapman/Raben: “Joseph Chamberlain was the first to suggest that the sixtieth year of the Queen’s accession should celebrate the Imperial family under the British Crown […]; in consequence none of the kings who had attended the Golden Jubilee were invited […]. On June 20th, Accession Day, she [Queen Victoria] entered St. George’s Chapel on the arm of an Indian servant for a simple service of thanksgiving” (46).

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logical implications and functions of the metaphors of empire as well as their constructive role in shaping views of the Empire have only recently been given due attention.8 This article focuses on ethical aspects of the processes involved. The following sections will review the most popular metaphors of empire and the dominant values they inscribe respectively. The focus will be on an analysis of the uses and ethical implications of the metaphors, which can be traced in a variety of literary and other genres and media. Combining approaches from the history of mentalities and colonial discourse analysis, what the present article is mainly concerned with are not the geographical or political extensions of the “real” British Empire—but the relationship between literature and mental life, as well as the ethical premises on which this “imperial idea” or empire “of the mind” was based. 3. Imperialist Values in Late Victorian Metaphors and Narratives of Empire: A Brief Overview The language of popular imperialism abounds with metaphors. It is probably no exaggeration to say that almost all Victorian writers—poets, politicians, and journalists alike—resorted to metaphors whenever they tried to conjure up the unity of Empire or to characterize the relationship between England and her colonies. The reason for this widespread tendency to talk about the Empire in metaphorical terms is not hard to determine. Resorting to metaphors was one way of conceptualizing something that defied direct observation and experience. Like other abstract phenomena which tend to be conceptualized metaphorically—such as history, government, the state9—the British Empire was a matter of considerable abstractness and heterogeneity.10 Metaphors of empire can be found in a large variety of fictional and non-fictional texts, ranging from poetry—notably in Tennyson, Swinburne, Kipling, and Newbolt—to history writing, travel literature, political _____________ 8

9 10

See Birk/Neumann, A. Nünning, “Das Britische Weltreich als Familie,” “Metaphors of Empire.” For an analysis of metaphors of empire from the perspective of cognitive metaphor theory, see A. Nünning, “Metaphors the British Thought, Felt and Ruled By,” “On the Emergence of an Empire of the Mind.” See Demandt’s, Peil’s, and Münkler’s encyclopedic monographs. See Mackenzie, who emphasizes that the Empire was “at least four separate entities. It was the territories of settlement […]. It was India […]. It was a string of islands and staging posts, a combination of seventeenth-century sugar colonies and the spoils of wars with European rivals, China and other non-European cultures. And finally, Empire was the ȧdependent’ territories acquired largely in the last decades of the nineteenth century” (1).

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speeches, and journalism. It is in poetry that the idea finds its most powerful expression,11 perhaps, but it informs a host of other genres and media as well. Even though the overall repertoire of rhetorical tropes in imperialist discourse is quite broad,12 the number of metaphors deployed to describe the Empire is relatively small. With regard to the choice of the metaphors, four source-domains from which metaphors of empire were drawn stand out.13 The imperialist values thus constructed certainly range from implicit to pronounced, and they are ethical values in the sense of the thick relations of the family to varying degrees. Not all of the metaphors of empire engage overtly in constructing values, moreover. Yet they all assert the unity of the Empire as something to be taken as given, and because of the ultimate family connotations of this unity they all ultimately support the family values—such as loyalty, respect for authority, harmony, restraint of the individual—that are carried over to the sphere of imperial relations. One recurrent image is the metaphor of the Empire as a tree.14 Writers who resort to this metaphor typically try not only to evoke organic growth and unity but also to warn against the results of a dissolution of the bond between England and her colonies. Froude, for instance, remarks that the tie between England and the British subjects in the colonies “is as the tie of a branch to the parent trunk—not mechanical, not resting on material interests, but organic and vital, and if cut or broken can no more be knotted again than a severed bough can be re-attached to a tree” (389-390). Froude’s powerful organic metaphors create a suggestive picture of the colonies as the source of the nation’s life: “The life of a _____________ 11

12 13

14

Poetry is one of the most interesting genres for anyone trying to come to terms with the interplay between culture, the history of mentalities, and British imperialism, as Müllenbrock has pointed out in a pioneering article: “Im viktorianischen Gattungsspektrum ist es jedenfalls die Lyrik, welche die interessantesten Einsichten in die genetischen Umstände, mentalitätsmäßigen Konstanten und stimmungsmäßigen Schwankungen des britischen Imperialismus gestattet” (141). With regard to the poetry of Kipling, see also MacDonald: “in verse he could express the imperial idea in its simplest and most powerful form” (145). For two excellent studies on the rhetoric of empire, see Suleri and Spurr, who do not, however, examine metaphors of empire more specifically. It should be noted at least in passing, however, that there are other metaphors that were occasionally used to depict the Empire. Charles Dilke, for instance, praises “the fabric of that splendid Empire” (I, 7). Despite the popularity of the wide-spread term ‘empirebuilder’, the Empire itself was only rarely described in terms of metaphors that belong to the source-domains of architecture of technology. The main reason for this seems to be that architectural metaphors do not go along very well with the maritime nature of England’s “Ocean-state” (Davidson I, 269), while technical metaphors draw attention to the role of man as an active force, something that organic metaphors tend to play down or ignore; see Demandt: “Organische und anorganische Natur waren Herkunftsbereiche von Metaphern, in denen der handelnde Mensch keine eigentliche Bedeutung besaß” (271). For an in-depth study of the use of this metaphor, see Birk/Neumann.

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nation, like the life of a tree, is in its extremities. The leaves are the lungs through which the tree breathes, and the feeders which gather its nutriment out of the atmosphere” (387). These metaphors project notions of organic growth onto historical developments and political relations. They also imply that colonialism was some kind of natural process which man could not and should not interfere with, as the following two rhetorical questions that Seeley raises at the end of his patriotic history illustrate: “Have we really so much power over the march of events as we suppose? Can we cancel the growth of centuries for a whim […] ?” (356). The answer, of course, is “no,” because the metaphors suggest that the empire was the result of organic growth. A second favourite trope is the metaphor of the Empire as a fleet. Though countless examples of the use of this metaphor can be found in the poetry of Tennyson, Kipling, and Newbolt,15 it finds its most elaborate expression in John Ruskin’s inaugural lecture on art. Although the logic of Ruskin’s conglomerate of heterogeneous metaphors, which results in a weird catachresis, begs a number of questions, the political lesson he tries to drive home can hardly be missed: So that literally, these colonies must be fastened fleets; and every man of them must be under authority of captains and officers, whose better command is to be over fields and streets instead of ships of the line; and England, in these her motionless navies (or, in the true and mightiest sense, motionless churches, ruled by pilots on the Galilean lake of all the world), is to “expect every man to do his duty.” (Ruskin 37-38)

A third recurrent mode of metaphorically encoding the British Empire is the trope of the body politic. The discursive framework provided by this metaphor has immense flexibility, as its currency from Elizabethan times to the Victorian period shows. The analogical techniques that link political organizations with natural organisms were deployed both by opponents of the Empire and by its ardent supporters, who used it to warn against the dismemberment of the Empire.16 The fact that the latter typically favour other metaphors, however, may be partly attributed to the fact that “Victorian degenerationism was obsessed with the decay of organisms both individual and collective” (Arata 6). The way in which Gladstone turns the metaphor of the body politic into a political argument in his speech _____________ 15

16

See, for instance, Tennyson: “Her dauntless army scattered, and so small,/ Her islandmyriads fed from alien lands—/ The fleet of England is her all-in-all;/ Her fleet is in your hands,/ And in her fleet her fate” (1345). See also Swinburne’s “The Armada,” Newbolt’s “Admirals All,” and Kipling’s poems “Cruiseres,” “The Liner She’s a Lady,” and “The Exiles’ Line.” See Baden-Powell: “Great Britain has been compared to a cuttlefish, the British Isles being the body and our distant Colonies the arms spread all over the world” (245).

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“England’s mission” illustrates how Victorian politicians made use of complex patterns of metaphorical reasoning: Of all the opinions disparaging to England, there is none which can lower her like that which teaches that the source of strength for this almost measureless body lies in its extremities, and not in the heart which has so long propelled the blood through all its regions, and in the brain which has bound and binds them into one. (Gladstone 570)

There was one metaphor, however, that arguably did more than any other to provide what Froude called “the spell which can unite all these communities into one,” namely, the ideologically charged metaphor of the Empire as a family. The number of sources here is legion.17 Like kinship metaphors in general, the metaphor of the Empire as a family invokes the parent-child image to describe the imperial relationship. Seeley’s definition of the word “colony” is a case in point: By a colony we understand a community which is not merely derivative, but which remains politically connected in a relation of dependence with the parent community. … Technically, it was entirely independent of the mother-state, though the sense of kindred commonly held it in a condition of permanent alliance. (Seeley 45)

The implications of kinship metaphors are not very difficult to determine.18 What is involved in the metaphor of the British Empire as a family is a mapping of the structure of the family onto the domain of the Empire in such a way as to set up correspondences between the slots of the source-domain and those of the target-domain. The metaphor of the Empire as a family implies that Great Britain was the mother-country and the colonies were her children. There is more to this than meets the eye, however, as Seeley’s definition of the term colony may serve to show. First, kinship metaphors imply notions of order, succession, and lineage. They suggest that colonies actually descended from the mother country, that England’s colonies were, as Charles Wentworth Dilke put it, “our offshoots or daughter-countries” (Problems of Greater Britain, I, 5). Second, kinship metaphors imply that the colonies are far from independent of the parent community. Third—and most important from the perspective of imperialist values—, they evoke a feeling of fellowship, “a sense of kindred,” as Seeley observes. _____________ 17

18

See, for instance, the ode that Sir Lewis Morris composed in celebration of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897: “Mother of all freemen! over all the earth/ Thy Empirechildren come to thy birth/ Vast continents are thine, or spring from thee/ Brave islandfortress of the storm-vexed sea” (quoted from Beloff 21). See also Dilke, Problems of Greater Britain II, 469-470, Froude 2-3, 5ff., 12, and the sources quoted in Bennett 48, 116-117, 122, 134, 143 ff., 185 and in Hyam/Martin 102-117. The following analysis is indebted to Lakoff/Johnson, Lakoff/Turner, and to Turner’s (1577) and Rigotti’s (77-114) pioneering work on kinship metaphors.

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Note that the power of the metaphorical uses of kinship terms lies not in any single metaphor such as “mother-country,” but derives from both the structure of the respective “Bildfeld,”19 of which any given metaphor is only a part, and the cultural knowledge associated with the source-domain. This means, for instance, that the metaphor “mother-country” not only maps the role and properties of the female parent onto Britain as a colonial power, but also links the domain of the family as well as its cultural connotations and values with the domains of colonialism and imperialism. What is arguably much more important than analyzing the structural correspondences between the slots of the source-domain and the targetdomain, then, is an investigation of the properties and cultural connotations associated with any given source-domain. As far as the metaphor of the imperial family of what became “Greater Britain” (Dilke, Greater Britain: A Record of Travel) is concerned, England’s rule over her colonies was interpreted not just within the logic of kinship relations, but also in terms of the norms and values associated by the Victorian public with family life. A particularly telling illustration of these values is “John Bull’s Christmas Family Party,” taken from the 1884 Christmas issue of Punch. It shows the eponymous John Bull, his wife, who is wearing a Union-Jack apron, and a group of well-behaved (colonial) children, who are wearing ribbons featuring the names of the various colonies. The cartoon is accompanied by the following poem: All the brave young slips of her, Offshoots, every one, of her, Love the yet red lips of her, All the force and fun of her; Gather round her loyally. Proud she to possess them all, Greets them all right loyally, Here’s their health! God bless ’em all!20

By creating analogies between the private domain of the family and the public sphere of international relations, kinship metaphors profoundly affected the way in which the British Empire was perceived and understood, suggesting that the essential character of the Empire was to be that of the family. It would be characterized by relationships, entered into willingly out of mutual respect, and with the benefits for all concerned. (A. Parry 85)

Kinship metaphors imply that the relationship between England and her colonies was based on unity, love, and harmony, as the following observation by Froude shows: “The colonists […] are proud of belonging to a _____________ 19 20

For the concept of “Bildfeld,” see Weinrich and Peil 24ff.. Punch 87 (1884, 306).

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nationality on whose flag the sun never sets. They honour and love their sovereign” (389). Froude even goes so far as to claim that “We ourselves […] are a realised family which desires not to be divided” (15). To make sure that none of the colonies might decide otherwise, Froude reminds them that the bond between the mother-country and the colonies was as insoluble as that between husband and wife, drawing a far-fetched analogy between the imperial relationship and marriage: They [the colonists] have as little thought of leaving us, as an affectionate wife thinks of leaving her husband. The married pair may have their small disagreements, but their partnership is for ‘as long as they both shall live.’ (Froude 390).

It is quite obvious that the attempt to domesticate the imperial relationship was meant to prevent—and pre-empt in ethical terms—whatever conflicts might arise. The kinship terms demonstrate that the “whole imperial struggle collapsed into a family squabble,” as the historian Gordon S. Wood (165) so aptly put it. Froude’s weird metaphorical reasoning is a case in point: Man and wife may be divorced in certain eventualities, but such eventualities are not spoken of among the contingencies of domestic life. Sons may desert their parents, but sons who had no such intention would resent the suggestion that they might desert them if they pleased. (Froude 394)

Another reason why kinship metaphors were instrumental in forging the unity of the Empire is that they suggest that the colonies were England’s progeny and that they had inherited salient characteristics of the mothercountry. Seeley, for instance, remarks that the colonies “are our own blood, a mere extension of the English nationality into new lands” (213). The rhetorical question which the speaker of Kipling’s poem “The Song of the Sons” raises sums up what the colonial sons are apparently most concerned about: “Judge, are we men of the Blood?” (Kipling 142). As its title already indicates, the poem “England’s Answer” provides the solution: “Truly ye come of the Blood” (Kipling 144). England’s majestic voice does not fail to add emphatically: “Flesh of the flesh that I bred, bone of the bone that I bare.” No matter what the trope is in any single case, most of the late Victorian metaphors of empire share at least three important characteristics: (1) they display what one might call a holistic rhetoric of unity,21 which finds its paradigmatic model in the thick relations and ethical obligations of the family; (2) they provide ways to make connections among widely disparate phenomena; and (3) they project onto the historical development a par_____________ 21

See Müllenbrock 120; the recurrent emphasis on unity and wholeness, which is one of the more prominent leitmotifs of the metaphors of empire and rhetoric of British imperialism, shows how apt Müllenbrock’s designating of this kind of rhetoric as “Empire-holism” actually is.

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ticular kind of story or narrative, which at the same time endows events with significance and value. The flagrant discrepancy between what we now know of the actual state of affairs in the British Empire, and the suggestive pictures generated by the imagery of imperialist discourse, leads to the question, more systematically, of what functions the metaphors served to fulfil. 4. Metaphors and Narratives of Empire from a Functionalist Point of View: Imperialist Mentalities and Ethical Dimensions Although most of the metaphors used for conceptualizing the Empire have unity as one of their salient semantic implications, this was a unity “of the mind” or the imperial imagination, rather than a factual one. The urgency and insistence with which Victorian writers cleave to the same metaphorical line indicates that great efforts were made to represent the state of the Empire as healthy. Rather than just taking the dominant rhetoric of unity, order, and harmony implied in imperialist kinship metaphors at face value or even mistaking such tropes for a simple reflection of historical realities, therefore, one might look more closely at the functions that metaphors of empire fulfilled. There are at least eight functions that can be identified, although many of them are syncretized in specific texts. In the first place, by reducing the complexity and elusiveness of the Empire’s diverse character, the metaphors imposed form and narrative coherence upon a chaotic reality. Their most obvious function was to impart some sort of structure to an amorphous geographical and political entity, thus serving as unifying devices. Despite their invariably reductive character, they could fulfil heuristic or cognitive functions, in that “they represent or stand for a very large entity, otherwise impossibly diffuse, which they enable one to grasp or see” (Said, Orientalism 66). As conceptual tools, metaphors resemble models. Imposing form upon an untidy reality, metaphors such as the family and the body politic served as models of thought, as conceptual fictions and ethical guidelines the Victorian age lived by.22 To identify the functions of such metaphors entirely with those of models, however, is to miss a significant cultural function that the tropes of imperialism were asked to perform. It would be reductive and misleading, for at least two reasons, to suggest that the metaphors of empire _____________ 22

This phrase is a borrowing from the influential study on the theory of metaphor by Lakoff/Johnson.

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were nothing but conceptual models. Equating these metaphors with models ignores the creative potential of metaphors in representing objects. In contrast to models, which represent structural relations, metaphors impose structures; they “often do creative work” (Turner 19).23 Metaphors not only create individual target-domain slots, they can also determine the way in which a given target-domain is perceived and understood in the first place. The second reason why metaphors are more than just conceptual or cognitive models is that the evoking of emotion is an important aspect of the metaphorical process, as Paul Ricoeur and other theorists have convincingly shown.24 In addition to their power to impose structure, metaphors of empire also served as important means of fostering and maintaining loyalty. This emotional function and ethical dimension is particularly obvious in the case of kinship metaphors because they imply—and demand, from those they address—a feeling of fellowship, a sense of togetherness: According to Turner, the “dominant component in kinship metaphors is Feeling” (41). Kinship metaphors stress the unity of the Empire, as Tennyson’s poem “Hands All Around” shows, explicitly addressed as it is to “all the loyal hearts who long/ To keep our English Empire whole!” (Tennyson 1311). Metaphors of empire not only asserted the unity of the British Empire, they also reinforced a wide range of ethical values and obligations by casting the imperial relationship in a benevolent light. A third function of metaphors of empire consisted in providing contemporaries with simplified, but more or less coherent frameworks for reinterpreting historical developments. As mental models, metaphorical fictions provided powerful tools for making sense of the imperial experience. By actually commenting upon the events and relations they purported merely to reflect or to report, metaphors served as a means for explaining complex historical processes and constellations. The structure and logic inherent in the metaphor of the imperial family, for instance, reduces the complexity of the imperial relationship and transforms an arbitrary series of historical events into simple, meaningful and ethically charged stories. Tennyson’s famous poem “Opening of the India and Colonial Exhibition by the Queen” (1886) is a case in point. In the first stanza, the lyrical I (or lyrical we, rather) welcomes the sons and brothers from the colonies. In the second stanza, the speaker expresses the hope that the colonial children will take after their imperial mother (“May we _____________ 23 24

Weinrich (309) also argues that metaphors create their analogies and correspondences. For the similarities and differences between metaphors and models, see the articles in Haverkamp and Bergem/Bluhm/Marx. See Ricoeur 143 and Köller, who also emphasizes the “konnotativen Komponenten und emotionalen Werkakzentuierungen” (202).

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find, as ages run,/ The mother featured in the son”). The third stanza provides an interesting example of how kinship metaphors served to reinterpret the past. It sums up the lesson which the poem claims Britain has drawn from the American Revolution: Britain fought her son of yore— Britain failed; and never more, Careless of our growing kin, Shall we sin our fathers’ sin, Men that in a narrower day— Unprophetic rulers they— Drove from out the mother’s nest That young eagle of the West To forage for herself alone; Britons, hold your own! (Tennyson 1358)

Tennyson uses the logic inherent in kinship metaphors to provide a very simplistic account of a complex historical process. In doing so, he takes up a highly conventionalized image which hundreds of writers before him had used to explain the conflict between England and her American colonies in the eighteenth century, as the historian Gordon S. Woods has pointed out.25 By rewriting history and turning imperial conflicts into readily intelligible stories, such metaphors helped to make sense of the past and to turn it into an ethically significant memory. One should note, however, that Tennyson, like many other authors who purported to look mainly at the past, in fact does so with an eye to the future. Rewriting history in terms of kinship metaphors was one of the means of trying to influence the future course of events. The lesson to be drawn from “our fathers’ sin” is that Britain should never again be “careless of our growing kin.” In the final stanza of Tennyson’s poem, the patriotic speaker reminds Britain’s brothers of their shared “glorious past” and appeals to them to “cleave to one another still.” In the final segment of the poem, the rhetoric of unity reaches its climax, when the questionable unity of the British Empire is finally affirmed in a unanimous exclamation: Britain’s myriad voices call, ‘Sons, be welded each and all, Into one imperial whole, One with Britain, heart and soul!

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See Wood: “In the decades leading up to the Revolution scarcely a piece of American writing, whig or tory, did not invoke the parent-child image to describe the imperial relationship. […] Because the image was so powerful, so suggestive of the personal traditional world in which most colonists still lived, almost the entire imperial debate was inevitably carried on within its confines” (165). See also Jensen.

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One life, one flag, one fleet, one Throne!’ Britons, hold your own! (Tennyson 1358)

It may be noted in passing that the welding of the sons results in a somewhat strained or mixed metaphor, which revealingly implies that more than just gentle force was necessary to achieve the everlasting unity of the Empire that the speaker is so anxious to conjure up and secure. Like many similar examples to be found in the language of popular imperialism, this mixed metaphor unwittingly deconstructs the fragile ideology of imperialism that it is actually meant to foster. Fourth, metaphors of empire fulfilled important normative functions because they authorized and propagated ideologically charged views of the relationship between the mother-country and her colonial children. They projected norms of behaviour associated with Victorian family life onto the relationship between England and her colonies. Even though one cannot extract a sophisticated political philosophy from any of these metaphors, they tend to leave no doubt as to what the desirable form of the imperial relationship was. According to the ideological views articulated by Coventry Patmore’s famous poem “The Angel in the House” (1854), for instance, or John Ruskin’s popular lecture “Of Queens’ Gardens” (1864), Victorian family was “a school of sympathy, tenderness, and loving forgetfulness of self” (Mill 253). Frederic Harrison’s 1893 lecture on “Family Life” is worth pausing over for the light it throws on Victorian bourgeois culture, its praise of both the home and family life: “The Home is the primeval and eternal school where we learn to practise the balance of our instincts, to restrain appetite, to cultivate affection, to pass out of our lower selves—to Live for Humanity” (Harrison 42). Harrison sums up what else there was to be learned in the school that the Victorian home and family and—by the implications of the metaphors of popular imperialism—the British Empire was thought to be:26 sentiment (1) of attachment, comradeship, fellowship, (2) of reverence for those who can teach us, guide us, and elevate us, of love which urges us to protect, help, and cherish those to whom we owe our lives and better natures. (Harrison 33)

It is only against the backdrop of what Houghton (341) has aptly called “the exaltation of family life” that the normative power of the metaphor of the imperial family of “Greater Britain” (Dilke, Greater Britain: A Record of Travel) can be properly gauged. Metaphors of empire not only import entities and structural relations from the various source-domains into the target-domain of the Empire, they also imply how the entities in the tar_____________ 26

See Sullivan, who points out that the metaphor of the Empire as family established a conceptual framework that saw “the empire as drawing room—a refined and civilized space where appropriate rules of conduct would ensure permanent occupancy” (3).

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get-domain are to be evaluated. The metaphor of the Empire as a family maps the feelings, norms and values of the private sphere of the family onto the relationship between England and her colonies. It turns the relation between the colonizer and colonized into an intimate and mutually profitable arrangement based on emotional ties, “transforming the empire into a Victorian domestic idyll” (Singh 91). Moreover, kinship metaphors suggest that the colonial children have a lot to gain and learn in the imperial school of sympathy, tenderness, and civilization: discipline, duty, and love of the (mother-)country. In his jingoistic poem “McAndrew’s Hymn,” Kipling puts these goals of British civilization in a memorable nutshell: “‘Law, Order, Duty an’ Restraint, Obedience, Discipline!’” (Kipling 102). With regard to the normative function of the metaphor of the Empire as a family, it is particularly obvious that metaphors influence the perception of both the target-domain and the source-domain. On the one hand, this metaphor determined the way in which the British Empire was conceptualized. On the other hand, it also affected the way in which the Victorian family was perceived. Functioning as a kind of double filter, kinship metaphors served to support a patriarchal model of family relations and reinforce bourgeois values. Fifth, metaphors of empire were often used as political arguments, both by fervent supporters of the imperial idea and by its opponents.27 As the politically motivated uses of organic metaphors by Froude, Seeley, and Gladstone have illustrated, the debates about the pros and cons of the Empire were carried out at least as much in metaphorical as in literal terms. The best-known example here is Benjamin Disraeli’s famous Crystal Palace speech, with its suggestive references to “the sympathy of the Colonies with the Mother Country” (Disraeli 45). But the emotional and ethical implications of the family metaphor could also be used to quite different ends by a liberal politician, as the following remark by Gladstone shows: The substance of the relationship lies, not in dispatches from Downing Street, but in the mutual affection and social sympathies, which can only flourish between adult communities when they are on both sides free. (Gladstone 572)

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See, for instance, Kipling’s poem “England’s Answer”; the conclusions that England, the lyrical I, draws from the law of inheritance shows how kinship metaphors could be turned into political arguments. England not only appeals to her colonial sons to “talk to your grey mother that bore you on her knees!” (Kipling 144), but also points out to them: “The Law that ye make shall be law and I do not press my will,/ Because ye are sons of The Blood and call me Mother still” (145). For an overview of the imperial idea and its enemies, see Thornton.

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Sixth, metaphors of empire fulfil legitimizing functions because they provided rationalizations of the imperial experience and justifications of the Empire. Forging emotional and ethical links between such manifestly unlike phenomena as the family and the Empire, the metaphors were an important means of legitimizing the imperial relationship. Like kinship metaphors, organic tropes constructed a narrative which justified the Empire through a teleological history of natural growth. Seventh, metaphors of empire were an important propagandistic and ideological means of nurturing the culture’s dominant fictions. They arguably served as subtle ideological tools of imperialism, because they glorified the imperial relationship by disseminating highly advantageous images of it. Metaphors helped to create that culturally sanctioned system of ideas, beliefs, presuppositions, and convictions which constitutes imperialist mentalities.28 Lastly, metaphors of empire were central to the formation of collective identities. The images and stories projected by metaphors were instrumental in what one might call the imaginative forging of the British Empire, because not only a nation but “any imagined community is held together by the stories it generates about itself” (Arata 1).29 Metaphors of empire served as an important means of maintaining an advantageous British self-image and of forging Britain’s national identity, something which was neither natural nor stable, but discursively constructed. Enhancing Britain’s pride in its own achievements or emphasizing the unity of the Empire was thus part of the complex political and cultural process that Linda Colley (1992) has felicitously called “Forging the Nation.” Conjuring up what Froude calls “the invisible bonds relationship” (393), kinship metaphors both emphasized and created “the bond which holds the Empire together” (391). Froude even resorts to medical imagery when he warns that “the dissolution of the bond will be regarded as an injury, to be neither forgiven nor forgotten” (389). 5. Conclusion The last quotation by Froude is typical once again of the constructive as well as normative potentials of metaphors of empire. More than just representing the Empire, these metaphors ultimately shaped the prevailing view of the relationship between England and her colonies. In doing so, _____________ 28 29

See Said, who equates Orientalism as a “system of ideological fictions” (Orientalism 321) with terms such as “a body of ideas, belief, clichès, or learning” (205), “systems of thought,” “discourses of power,” and with Blake’s famous “mind-forg’d manacles” (328). For the concept of imagined communities, see Anderson.

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they popularized certain values, biases, epistemological habits, providing agreed-upon codes of understanding and cultural traditions of looking at the Empire. Crucially, they not only inscribed but proscribed imperialist values for millions of British subjects around the globe to follow. Working simultaneously on different cognitive, emotional, normative, and ideological levels, metaphors of empire are a productive medium that played a creative role in generating the ideological fictions on which imperialism was based. Shaping habits of thought, popular feeling, as well as views of the imperial present and past, metaphors of empire were central to “imperialism’s consolidating vision” (Said, Culture and Imperialism 288), since they “nurtured the sentiment, rationale, and above all the imagination of empire” (12). Like the narratives, myths, and fictions they involved, they played an important part in the making of imperialist mentalities, organizing the conceptual and emotional realities by which the Empire was perceived and experienced. Such metaphors established a world view and a configuration of values that was conducive to maintaining and advancing the imperial cause. If Umberto Eco’s hypothesis that the “success of a metaphor is a function of the sociocultural format of the interpreting subjects’ encyclopedia” (254) is valid, then it is no coincidence that the metaphor of the Empire as a family was by far the most popular rhetorical trope for describing the relationship between England and her colonies. The power of kinship metaphors rested largely on the way they linked the private with the collective and public domain. Most prominent among the many functional advantages of kinship metaphors, is their power to represent complex political and historical issues in a simplified and familiar, though nonetheless ideologically charged language. Kinship metaphors assimilated political problems to the vocabulary of everyday life, translating the relationship between England and her colonies into the language, norms and values of the private sphere of family life. As the ubiquity of metaphors of empire across various genres and media demonstrates, it is not only authors who think in terms of metaphors, but whole cultures.30 The suggestive and familiar notions of the metaphor of the Empire as a family served to create and support the perceptual and ideological fictions of imperialism. The plethora of such metaphors support the hypothesis that they constitute what Elizabeth Ermath, in a different context, has called the “collective awareness of a culture” (89). By giving shape and meaning to the British Empire, they constructed an important “article of collective cultural faith” (122), _____________ 30

See Link/Wülfing, who argue that metaphors to a great extent pre-structure mentalities to emphasize the collective nature of this process: “Nicht nur Dichter […] ȧdenken in Bildern’, auch ȧKulturen’ insgesamt” (14).

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namely, Victorian England’s imperialist view of the world, which was imposed on the colonies as well. Metaphors such as the Empire as a tree, as body politic, and, above all, as a family that “created in the collective imagination the shape of the British empire to come” (Singh 63). What Edward Dowden said about the enormous influence of Kipling’s poetry, then, is equally true of the effect exerted by metaphors of empire: “They have served to evoke or guide the feelings of nations, and to determine action in great affairs” (in Green 259). Froude seems to have sensed this power of discourse and rhetoric in determining the perception and construction of reality: Were Oceana an accepted article of faith, received and acknowledged as something not to be called into question, it would settle into the convictions of all of us, and the organic union which we desiderate would pass silently into a fact without effort of political ingenuity. (Froude 394-395)

So, in metaphors of empire, and without apparently being aware of it, the Victorians had already found the discursive spell which could unite all these communities into one, above all through the ubiquitous parent-child image that turned thin relations into a semblance of thick family relations, with all the imperialist values and ethical obligations implied. While testifying to the power of colonial discourse and the significance of imperialist mentalities over imperial realities, however, metaphors of empire also occlude the political, economic, and military aspects of imperialism. Often enough, the vocabulary of the family metaphor mutes the cultural conflicts and contradictions inherent in the relationship between colonizer and colonized. Given the well-known appeals against the textualism of colonial discourse analysis and its successors—“Cults like post-modernism, discourse analysis, New Historicism” (Said, Culture and Imperialism 366)31—, what should be remembered, and still requires closer attention, is how the imperialist values articulated by metaphors of empire compare, or not, to the historical realities of imperialism. In the meantime, one might conclude by saying that just as they create an empire “of the mind,” metaphors of empire also create an “ethics of the mind,” and only “of the mind.” The extent to which they conjure up a harmonious imperial family is arguably a measure of the good that the British Empire did not do.

_____________ 31

For this criticism, see also B. Parry.

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Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. The English Novel in History 1840-1895. London: Routledge, 1997. Eubanks, Philip. “The Story of Conceptual Metaphor: What Motivates Metaphoric Mappings?” Poetics Today 20.3 (1999): 419-442. Fredeman, William E., ed. “Introduction: ‘England Our Home: Victoria Our Queen.’” Victorian Poetry 25.3 (1987): 1-9. Froude, James Anthony. Oceana, or England and her Colonies. London: Longmans, Green, 1886. Gladstone, William E. “England’s Mission.” The Nineteenth Century 4 (1878): 560-584. Green, Roger L. Kipling: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1971. Harrison, Frederic. “Lecture II: Family Life.” 1893. On Society. Essay Index Reprint Series. New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1918. 32-55. Haverkamp, Anselm, ed. Theorie der Metapher. 2nd ed. Darmstadt: WBG, 1996. Houghton, Walter E. The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830-1870. New Haven: Yale UP, 1957. Hrushovski, Benjamin. “Poetic Metaphor and Frames of Reference.” Poetics Today 5 (1984): 5-43. Hyam, Ronald, and Ged Martin. Reappraisals in British Imperial History. London: Macmillan, 1975. Ingham, Patricia. The Language of Gender and Class: Transformations in the Victorian Novel. London: Routledge, 1996. Jensen, J. Vernon. “British Voices on the Eve of the American Revolution: Trapped by the Family Metaphor.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 63 (1977): 43-50. Kipling, Rudyard. The Complete Verse. London: Kyle Cathie, 1990. Koebner, Richard, and Helmut Dan Schmidt. Imperialism: The Story and Significance of a Political Word, 1840-1960. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1964. Köller, Wilhelm. Semiotik und Metapher: Untersuchungen zur grammatischen Struktur und kommunikativen Funktion von Metaphern. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1975. Kreutzer, Eberhard. “Theoretische Grundlagen postkolonialer Literaturkritik.” Literaturwissenschaftliche Theorien, Modelle, Methoden: Eine Einführung. Ed. Ansgar Nünning. 2nd ed. Trier: WVT, 1995. 199213. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. Lakoff, George, and Mark Turner. More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.

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Link, Jürgen, and Wulf Wülfing, eds. “Einleitung.” Bewegung und Stillstand in Metaphern und Mythen. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984. 7-14. MacDonald, Robert H. The Language of Empire: Myths and Metaphors of Popular Imperialism, 1880-1918. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1994. MacKenzie, John M. “Introduction.” Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880-1960. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984. 1-14. Mangan, J.A. ed. “Introduction: Making Imperial Mentalities.” Making Imperial Mentalities: Socialisation and British Imperialism. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1990. 1-22. Margalit, Avishai. The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002. Mill, John Stuart. The Subjection of Women. 1869. London: Dent, 1974. Müllenbrock, Heinz-Joachim. “Literatur als Politik: Zur Funktion imperialistischer Lyrik im viktorianischen England.” Anglia 110 (1992): 119-142. Münkler, Herfried. Politische Bilder, Politik der Metaphern. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1994. Neumann, Birgit. “Metaphern des Empire am Beispiel von James Anthony Froudes Reisebericht Oceana, or England and her Colonies (1886): ȧThe spell which can unite all these communities into one.’” In: Sprachkunst XXXVI (2005): 327-346. Newbolt, Henry. Collected Poems 1897-1907. London: Nelson, 1910. Nünning, Ansgar, “Literatur, Mentalitäten und kulturelles Gedächtnis: Grundriß, Leitbegriffe und Perspektiven einer anglistischen Literaturwissenschaft.” Literaturwissenschaftliche Theorien, Modelle, Methoden: Eine Einführung. 2nd ed. Trier: WVT, 1995. 173-197. —: “Das Britische Weltreich als Familie: Empire-Metaphern in der spätviktorianischen Lyrik als Denkmodelle und als Mittel der historisch-politischen Sinnstiftung.” Anglistik und Englischunterricht 58: Intercultural Studies: Fictions of Empire (1996): 91-120. —: “Metaphors of Empire: Victorian Literature and Culture, and the Making of Imperialist Mentalities.” Anglistentag 1997 Gießen. Proceedings of the Conference of the German Association of University Teachers of English: Volume XIX. Eds. Raimund Borgmeier, Herbert Grabes, and Andreas H. Jucker. Trier: WVT, 1998. 347-367. —: “Metaphors the British Thought, Felt and Ruled By, or: Modest Proposals for Historicizing Cognitive Metaphor Theory and for Exploring Metaphors of Empire as a Cultural Phenomenon.” Literature and Linguistics: Approaches, Models, and Applications. Studies in Honour of Jon Erickson. Eds. Marion Gymnich, Ansgar Nünning, and Vera Nünning. Trier: WVT, 2002. 101-127.

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—: “On the Emergence of an Empire of the Mind: Metaphorical ReMembering as a Means of Narrativizing and Naturalizing Cultural Transformations.” Metamorphoses. Structures of Cultural Transformations. REAL – Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 20. Ed. Jürgen Schlaeger. Tübingen: Narr, 2005. 59-97. Nünning, Ansgar, and Vera Nünning. “Fictions of Empire and the Making of Imperialist Mentalities: Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory as a Paradigm for Intercultural Studies.” Anglistik und Englischunterricht 58: Intercultural Studies: Fictions of Empire (1996): 731. Nünning, Ansgar, and Jan Rupp. “Königin Viktorias Thronjubiläen: Konstitutive Medienereignisse einer imperialen Erinnerungskultur.” Medienereignisse der Moderne. Eds Friedrich Lenger and Ansgar Nünning. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2008. 61-78. Parry, Ann. The Poetry of Rudyard Kipling: Rousing the Nation. Buckingham: Open UP, 1992. Parry, Benita. “Directions and Dead Ends in Postcolonial Studies.” Relocating Postcolonialism. Eds. Ato Quayson and David Theo Goldberg. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. 66-81. Peil, Dietmar. Untersuchungen zur Staats- und Herrschaftsmetaphorik in literarischen Zeugnissen von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1983. —: “Überlegungen zur Bildfeldtheorie.” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 112.2 (1990): 209-241. Ricoeur, Paul. “The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling.” Critical Inquiry 5 (1978): 143-159. Rigotti, Francesca. Die Macht und die Metaphern: Über die sprachlichen Bilder der Politik. Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 1994. Ruskin, John. Lectures on Art. 1887. London: George Allen, 1904. Said, Edward. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. 1978. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995. —: Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1993. Seeber, Hans Ulrich. “Der Ballonsaufstieg als Spektakel und Metapher: Zur Assimilierung neuen Wissens in die englische Versdichtung des 19. Jahrhundert.” Bewegung und Stillstand in Metaphern und Mythen. Eds. Jürgen Link and Wulf Wülfing. Stuttgart: KlettCotta, 1984. 165-200. Seeley, John Robert. The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures. 1883. London: Macmillan, 1900. Singh, Jyotsna G. Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: “Discoveries” of India in the Language of Colonialism. London: Routledge, 1996.

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Spurr, David. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration. Durham: Duke UP, 1993. Strachey, Lytton. Queen Victoria. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1921. Suleri, Sara. The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. Sullivan, Zohreh T. Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. Tennyson, Alfred Lord. The Poems of Tennyson. Ed. Christopher Ricks. London: Longmans, 1969. Thornton, Archibald P. The Imperial Idea and its Enemies: A Study in British Power. London: Macmillan, 1963. Turner, Mark. Death is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Walton, J. Lawson. “Imperialism.” Contemporary Review 75 (1899): 305-310. Weinrich, Harald. Sprache in Texten. Stuttgar: Klett, 1976. Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.

MARGIT SICHERT (GIESSEN)

Prominent Values in Nineteenth-Century Histories of English Literature Why literary histories with their presentation of a canon of books? A question that can still raise long discussions nowadays in academic circles, yet not nearly as much as in the sixties and early seventies.1 At that time, a culture war was going on, traditional authorities were questioned, new values were put on the pedestal—above all, equality, which meant abolishing all hierarchies and anything smacking of elitism. But the literary historians of the nineteenth century had the best intentions to serve the nation when they established their canons of literary excellence. Their literary histories were meant as national monuments, as guides to an imagined museum of national literary treasures. And they were meant to serve the dissemination of values—values that determined the selection and rating of authors and their works, their arrangement, the extent and emphases of their presentation, as well as values more directly expressed in positive or negative commentary. 1. The Nation, Education and Empire The most prominent value of all in these histories is the glory and sanctity of the nation. We know that literary historians of the nineteenth century saw themselves as nation-builders. Yet the extent to which this was the case is truly amazing from our present-day perspective. Everything in their writings is made to serve this aim. All over Europe, impressive canons of national literature were established, mostly comprising not only belleslettres but also philosophical, theological, historical and legal works, and often important ones from the sciences.2 It is therefore to be expected, that all British authors of nineteenth-century histories of English literature stress the importance of their work for the nation. As the following survey will show, this does not mean, however, that they all focus on the same aspects and promote the same values. Here are a few examples. _____________ 1 2

On the “canon wars” see Casement; Jay; Robinson; Müller, “Zwischen kulturellem Nationalismus und Multikulturalismus”; Grabes, “The Canon Pro and Contra.” See Sichert and Grabes.

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William Chambers,3 a Scotsman, published his history of English literature in 1836 as a part of Chambers’ Educational Course, a series edited by William and Robert Chambers that played an important role within the nineteenth–century effort to provide education for the people. Written for a much wider readership than Thomas Warton’s literary history from the late eighteenth-century, it served Chambers’ goal to be the teacher of the nation, eager to share his knowledge of the national literary treasures with the public, making “the best productions of English intellect from AngloSaxon to the present Time” (Chambers, Cyclopedia 1:5) a part of collective memory . He considered literary history as a branch of national history, especially of mentality, and his highest goal was to influence this mentality and change it for the better: Nor is it to be overlooked, how important an end is to be attained by training the entire people to venerate the thoughtful and eloquent of past and present times. These gifted beings may be said to have endeared our language and institutions our national character, and the very scenery and artificial objects which mark our soil—to all who are acquainted with and can appreciate their writings. (Ibid.)

No doubt Chambers was moved to alarm by what was taking place around him. There was the social and political strife of the 1830s, influenced not least by the ideas of the great American and French revolutions of the late eighteenth-century, which threatened Britain’s monopoly on political wisdom and tested the English vision of liberty almost to the point of destruction (Langford 273). Chambers, with the touch of a psycho-social and political savior, seems to have found a more peaceful solution—he endeavored to rescue national unity through the values of literary heritage, by encouraging public esteem for national literary heroes: Assuredly, in our common reverence for a Shakspeare [sic], a Milton, a Scott, we have a social and uniting sentiment which not only contains in itself part of our happiness as a people, but much that counteracts influences that tend to set us in division. (Chambers, Cyclopaedia v)

To create such an impact, it was important to ensure that the image of the nation remained unblemished, with anything that might have a negative effect being either played down or turned into something positive. Had Chambers, for instance, tried to get over the national trauma of the Norman Conquest by almost erasing it, squeezing it into a single sentence, George Lillie Craik, in his more comprehensive literary history of 1845, turned the violent invasion into an event that was wholly beneficial for cultural and literary history. _____________ 3

For Robert Chambers see also Sichert, “Implanting Literary History.”

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This pride of theirs, however, worked beneficially upon the whole: in the first place, it was in great part merely a proper estimation of the advantages of knowledge over ignorance; and secondly it helped to make the man of the pen a match for him of the sword— the natural liberator of the human race for its natural oppressor. (Craik, Sketches 1:49)

While British literary historians of the nineteenth-century normally wrote for a British readership, Thomas Budge Shaw as early as 1847 presented the national treasure of English literature abroad, in St. Petersburg, where he taught English language and literature and had his Outlines of English Literature published. He tells us that “each country is particularly proud of that class to which it owes its brightest and least disputable glory” and that the Englishman is “particularly vain of his country’s naval achievements”; the British Navy is “most entwined with all the sympathies of the national heart” (Shaw 493). In the naval and military novels he finds lots of originals and eccentrics who are often said to be typically English.4 And the relationship between England and the sea is indeed a long and cherished chapter in Britain’s history, and is seen as part of the national character.5 There seems to be no doubt: England gained an Empire because it was made to gain it, and full of patriotic pride Shaw emphasized the aesthetic, ethical, social, and political values to be found in the literature of his own country, and saw every reason to expect a like glorious future: So glorious a past can promise nothing but a future as illustrious. The same powers and influences which have enabled England to produce more and greater things than any other community can boast, are still at work; and will enable her to produce others, different in kinds perhaps, but as durable, as splendid, as sublime. (540)

1853 and 1855 were years of triumph for literary historians and their endeavors to educate the nation: in 1853, public examinations for the English Civil Service were introduced, in 1855 public examinations for the Indian Civil Service; in both, familiarity with the English language and literature was tested. For the Indian Civil Service alone, candidates had to take two three-hour oral exams.6 This was a triumph for the middle classes, who had high expectations regarding the value of education— aiming at wisdom and power, as Frederick Denison Maurice had already proclaimed in 1840, in his introductory lecture at King’s College, London.7 _____________ 4 5 6 7

See Langford 267-301. See Barker, The Character, especially the article by J.A. Williamson. See Stierstorfer 258. “They [the members of the middle-class] expect, in some way, that Education is to confer upon them these benefits—that is both to make them wise, and to give them an influence in the nation which they had not before” (Maurice 71).

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The Reverend Thomas Arnold, Mathew Arnold’s younger brother and Professor of English Literature at the Catholic University in Dublin, teaches his readers right from the start in his Short History of English Literature from 1870 that England has a glorious literary past and presence. He presents England above all as a nation of writers: “It is said that, on the average, not fewer than two thousand distinct works, upon every conceivable subject, are published in this country every year” (Arnold 1:1). On the basis of this fact, he proudly assumes: Now this country in which we live has been inhabited by men more or less civilized for at least thirty successive generations; and although it is but of late years that our countrymen have taken to writing books at such a prodigious rate, it is obvious that the same causes, which at the present day are continually adding to the number of English books, must have been more or less at work for a very long time past; from which it follows that the entire stock of English books must be very large indeed. (Ibid.)

And Henry Morley,8 a promoter of English literature with a highly religious and political mission who had given up the medical profession to become “the first Englishman to make the academic teaching of English his full-time profession,”9 took the next step three years later in his First Sketch of English Literature: for him, literature is a kind of biography of the nation—and through its literature one could gain access to the “higher promptings of the soul” of his country (Morley 1). He celebrated literature as a unique force, which is first of all moral: “the literature of this country has for its most distinctive mark the religious sense of duty,” the constant endeavor of the English people “to find out the right and to do it, to root out the wrong and labour ever onward for the love of God” (Morley i). And as the literature of the nation reveals the “religious sense of duty” as the purpose of liberty, literary history is more than “a bewilderment of names, dates, and short summaries of conventional opinions” (Morley 1). In disseminating this moral and religious purpose it fulfills a political task of the utmost importance for the future of the nation: “If this be really the strong spirit of the people, to show that it is so is to tell how England won, and how alone she can expect to keep her foremost place among the nations” (ibid.). Stopford Brooke, a divine like Arnold, in his literary history from 1876 also knows how to nourish the pride of the English nation. Though of Irish origin, he identifies in his Primer totally with the English and is most radical in his desire to create an all-embracing national “we”: strong, born to fight and born to conquer, like those much-praised ancestors, the _____________ 8 9

For Henry Morley’s views see further Sichert, “Henry Morley’s First Sketch.” Gross 172.

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German Anglo-Saxons, from whom the English nation, in his view, inherited its national character: When we came to Britain we were great warriors and great sea pirates––“sea wolves” as a Roman poet calls us; and all our poetry down to the present day is full of war, and still more of the sea. No nation has ever written so much sea poetry […]. But we were more than mere warriors. We were a home loving people when we got settled either in Sleswick or in England, and all our literature from the first writings to the last is full of domestic love, the dearness of home, and the ties of kinsfolk. (Brooke 8)

Behind this proud eulogy there seems to lurk the promotion of the Empire, as a logical consequence of this inheritance, as also the notion of “muscular Christianity”10 with its virile refinement of Christian ideals. This becomes even more obvious when we consider the following sketch of the national character: We were a religious people, even as heathen, still more so when we became Christian; and our poetry is as much tinged with religion as with war. Whenever literature died down in England it rose again in poetry, and the first poetry at each recovery was religious, or linked to religion. (Ibid.)

Like Morley, he considers this triumph, the genius of the English race, to come from God. Here the myth of the English as God’s chosen people11 becomes clearly visible. No doubt, Brook wished to excite enthusiasm for the nation and its literature––and he attained his goal. His literary history was extremely successful, becoming the standard introduction to the history of English literature.12 Even George Saintsbury, Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, who in his Short History of English Literature from 1898 fights for aesthetic values, became a radical nationalist when it came to the discussion of possible foreign influences. This becomes all too evident when he writes, for instance, about the possible influence of Norman literature. Whether he really believed “that France had little or no literature to give to England” (Saintsbury 30), “that what she had (a chanson de geste or two, and some verse saint-lives rather less formless than England’s own) were things of little importance and less influence” (31), we do not know. That he published this view is a fact. For a champion of national excellence it was important that English literature and English authors never be in need of any help from abroad.

_____________ 10 11 12

See Hall. Grabes, “Elect Nation.” For more information see Jacks 1: 286.

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2. Englishness With the nation being of supreme importance, it is no wonder that for all literary historians of the nineteenth-century, to be English was a value in itself––and although the first literary historians were Scotsmen, and Collier and Brooke were Irish, to belong to the English nation and celebrate its literature, its patriotism and its Englishness was the desire.13 While it is true that in Chambers’ literary history from 1836, humanistic values are at the center, already his Encyclopaedia from 1844 is designed to make English people happy, by giving them the sense of belonging to the right community. When looking for the particular qualities that make up the value of Englishness, we find that Shaw in his literary history leads us from landscape poetry to the beauty of the English landscape and then to the “intensity of feeling for the eternal loveliness of nature” (358) as a trait of the English national character:14 There is no country whose climate affords so great a variety and richness of external beauty as that of Great Britain; none which is the surface of the land is more picturesquely broken into form and tint of beauty, none more abundant in spots sanctified by memory, none where the changes of climate are more capricious and imposing. The finest art of the most idiomatic literature of England bears testimony to the intensity of feeling for the eternal loveliness of nature which seem to form a distinctive feature of the national character—a trait more marked perhaps among us than even among the ancient Greeks. (Ibid.)

Thomas Arnold stresses a trait of Englishness he sees in the tradition of risking the realization of grand designs even if failure is the result—a tradition particularly valuable because it invalidates the cliché that the English were a nation of mean shopkeepers. “To form plans too vast to be realized seems rather characteristic of English literary men,” he writes, continuing: thus Spenser accomplished only one half of his design in the Faerie Queen; Bacon left his Instauratio Magna in great part a mere sketch; Coleridge is notorious for magnificent promise and scanty performance, and the late Mr. Buckle planned his great work, the History of Civilization in England, upon a scale too vast for any human industry or talent to accomplish in one life. (Arnold 1:31)

“But if this be a failing, it is a glorious failing” (ibid.)—there is pride and triumph and consolation in this final statement. _____________ 13 14

For the more recent discussion of the Englishness of the writing of English literary history itself see A. Nünning. This shows itself in the fact that “[g]ardening is probably the most popular of all English recreations.” And Pitman, with considerable pride and enthusiasm, even assumes: “At heart every Englishman is a gardener, just as at heart our England is a garden” (Pitman 460).

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And again, Arnold, like other literary historians of this time, takes pride in the importance of liberty for the English. What he adds is manliness, so that he can speak of the “manful proud spirit of English freedom” (Arnold 1: 90).15 And what he further highlights is the “English Genius for detail” which is tightly intertwined with practicality.16 He sees it at work in an exemplary manner in the writing of Defoe, which is thereby rendered convincingly realistic: “his fiction, so observant was the man, and so quick at transposing into a thousand lifelike shapes his rich experience, had an air of reality which many sober histories are without” (2: 315). It may have been this among other features that led to “literary glory,” the triumphant attribute Arnold presents as a “characteristic product of the English mind”—although it has deteriorated.17 A favorite way for authors of nineteenth-century literary histories to disseminate the values that in their eyes made up Englishness, was to present the one or other author as an exemplar, or at least as someone embodying one or more of the essential values. Thus Shaw praises Addison, who possessed “a most enviable reputation for purity and integrity” (289), and when we come to Thomas Arnold, does it surprise us that he as a minister of the Church should choose someone like Wiclif as an example of “the thorough and typical Englishman”(Arnold 1: 17)? What reminds us of Samuel Smiles’ ideal of “self help”18 is the particular value he emphasizes: That instinct of self-assertion and self-establishment without which neither a community nor a private person can really prosper,—which corresponds in man to the ‘struggle for existence’ among the lower animals,––has always been especially prominent in the English character, and has been productive, together with some evils, of many of our national virtues, and all of our national success. (Arnold 1: 17)

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18

“The freeborn Englishman was not only a favourite invocation of the English themselves but an enduring, if less treasured, image of their European neighbors” (Langford 267). See Langford, especially “Practicality”. “[T]hat literary glory which has accompanied us down from the age of Elizabeth, and has been in each generation the most beautiful, the most influential, and the most characteristic product of the English mind, fades away into a dim and distant twilight in the later portion of the eighteenth century ” (Arnold 2: 347). For Samuel Smiles self reliance, struggle and self creation were the key to respect and independence. Again it was a Scot who had brought this cultural export to England. “The message of ‘Self-help’ appealed to many English middle and working class people. By the 1850s it was a British message despite its Scottish origin. These rags to riches tales were not of course new in the 1850s. What Smiles had contributed in his great secular sermons was a keen sense of morality and moral self-creation” (Morris 35). “Self-help was one of the favourite mid-Victorian values. […] What he was saying has been said by the wisest of men before him: it reflected ‘experience, example and foresight.’ ‘Heaven helps them who help themselves’” (Briggs 86).

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This strength of character had enabled Wiclif, along with the English people, to defy papal censure in the fourteenth century. It is worth noting that Arnold links the “instinct of self assertion and self-establishment” closely to the stance of Protestantism; in this way, he confirms at least a partial identity of Protestant religion and Englishness and the English nation, as has been asserted by Kohn.19 For Collier, in his History of English Literature in Series of Biographical Sketches from 1861, it is Milton who is the ideal of the young Englishman, whose firmness and purity triumphs over all the Italian temptations against which Ascham had warned the English youth: “Amid all the licence and vice of continental life, as it then was, he passed pure and unstained, returning with the bloom of this young religious feeling unfaded, like the flush of English manhood on his cheek” (Collier 198). Collier sees a high value both in action and in thought, these forming a site of strength from which the nation can profit. This becomes evident when he states proudly: “To continental strangers, Cromwell and Milton, the man of action and the man of thought were the representative men of England. The great British Lions, who were then really worth of a visit and a view” (202). According to Henry Morley’s First Sketch of English Literature, which was reprinted nineteen times between 1873 and 1912, an ideal representative of Englishness would be someone who shows a deep religious orientation20 in his feeling, thoughts and acts. Typical is the praise John Bunyan receives: “Depth of feeling, vivid imagination, and an absorbing sense of reality of the whole spiritual world revealed to him in his Bible, made Bunyan a grand representative of a religious feeling of the people” (Morley 662). The religious feeling Morley has in mind is the New Testament caritas, the caring love of those in need, as is expressively stated by his referring to St. Francis, who “by his example gathered others to his work of bringing religion to the hearts of wretched men by works of love” (Morley 73). The patriotism of Stopford Brooke comes out in the crowning statement we find at the end of his literary history: “To think of one [Caed_____________ 19

20

“[T]he birth of nationalism in the Puritan Revolution determined and still determines the character of English nationalism. England was the first country where a national consciousness embraced the whole people. It became so deeply engrained in the English mind that nationalism lost its problematic character with the English. […] From its origin English nationalism preserved its peculiar characteristics; it has always been, and still is, closer than any other to the religious matrix from which it rose, and is imbued with the spirit of liberty asserted in a struggle against ecclestical and civil authority” (Kohn 178). “[…] English religion offers difficulties to the enquiring, and above all to the logical, mind” (Barker, “Religion” 57). More about its characteristics, its role and value and history in Ernest Barker, “Religion.”

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mon] and then of the other [Tennyson], and of the great continuous stream of literature that has flowed between them, is more than enough to make us all proud of the name of Englishmen” (185). The old English poet Caedmon is for him “the genius of our race” (13). There is the idea of the English, a race so close to poetry,21 and the English as God’s chosen people, along with the idea of predestination that lurks behind this statement. The first English poet has learnt the art of poetry from God, as Bede tells us (Stopford Brooke is not the only writer to recount in full Bede’s story about how Caedmon became a poet). On the other hand, it is Tennyson who is Brooke’s idea of the model patriot. And there is still another version—what one might call the gentleman’s edition of Englishness,22 and this is embodied by Chaucer—the first to bring laughter into

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22

“Yet it remains true to an unusual degree that England is a land of amateur poets; and if the gentlemen cannot quite hold their own place with the Players, poetry is yet a natural— almost, indeed a normal—mode of expression for the English race, and not a rare and remote or highly specialized kind of utterance best left to the professional bards. What is it, that the English mind and character, or in the English way of life, that has proved so propitious to poetry? The answer must surely be that Englishmen, by reason of their defects no less than their virtues, are closer than most peoples to those reservoirs from which poetry springs.” (Sutherland 305) “Another constant in English character is the figure and idea of the gentleman. The idea of the gentleman is not a class idea (it was ceasing to be that even in the sixteenth century), it is the idea of a type of character. It is an idea which has its mutations. […] It was in many ways a curious code. It was hardly based on religion, though it might be instilled in sermons: it was a mixture of stoicism with medieval lay chivalry, and of both with unconscious national ideals half Puritan and half secular. Yet, if it contained such national ideals, it was not a national code, in the sense that it embraced the nation: it was the code of an elite (from whatever classes the elite was drawn) rather than the code of the nation at large. […] But it is also impossible to think of the character of the gentleman clearly. It has an English haze. Yet a pattern of behaviour, however hazy, remains a pattern; and whether you love it or laugh at it. This English pattern spreads more and more as more and more schools set themselves to the work of forming and strengthening character.” (Barker, “An Attempt at Perspective” 566)

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English literature23, and humor as one of the essentials of Englishness;24 indeed, he is seen as the ideal English humorist.25 What must by no means be forgotten in discussing the attempt at defining Englishness, however, is the racial bias so prevalent at the time. Right at the beginning of his literary history, John Morley, for instance, goes back to the origins and descent of his people, seeing it as a result of a mixing of several races into a new and superior synthesis. “The gift of genius,” “artistic eminence,” “active and bold fancy,” “delight in music,” “delight in bright colour,” and a “sense of literature as an art” (Morley 9) as the heritage of the Celtic race were in his view combined with the virtues of the Teutons, who were “practical, earnest, social, true to a high sense of duty” and possessed a strong “faith in God” (20-21). These inherited strengths are seen as gifts not only ensuring survival but also including all chances for a good and exemplary life, thus raising the English people to the higher realms of the human race and justifying their claim to be the leader of other nations on a path predestined by God. 3. English Genius Although an integrated part of Englishness, “English genius” for the authors of the histories of national literature was a matter of special concern. Shaw, for instance, as a proud promoter of English values at St. Petersburgh, does not get tired of referring proudly to the fact that to the glory of England it must be said, that the vernacular literature of no civilized nation in ancient or modern times can show so long and so splendid a list of men rising from the humbler classes of citizens, and eternizing their own age and their country’s greatness by triumph of valour, of wisdom and of genius. Among

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25

“In our literature, laughter, in fact, begins with Chaucer. Whatsoever things are ‘Old English’ are laughterless. We may wonder, again, whether the best laughter—the most purely engaging—in our literature is not the first—the Chaucerian.” (Brooke 45) “That the English are, except for their humorists, particularly distinguished for humour, an Englishman (but no foreigner) may be permitted to doubt. The surest way, of course, to affront any Englishman is to suggest to him that he has no sense of humour. He would as soon have it said that he did not like dogs. For the detestable crime of not liking dogs a man may, in truth excuse himself in more ways than one. But to want humour has no forgiveness. It is felt as a defect ‘even in the most oracular soul’ says Emerson, an oracular American. In ordinary men—which is what some of us are, and most of us are and most of us affect to be- it comes near, a man might suppose, to having no soul at all. Whether this means that we esteem humour very highly, or somewhat below its worth, may be reckoned uncertain.” (Garrod 350) “The best of our literary humour falls, compared with that of other nations, serious and tender” (ibid.).

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these, not the least remarkable is John Bunyan, whose career was as extraordinary as his origin was low, or as his productions are inimitable and original. (232)

For many readers this may have sounded astonishing, and this may have been one of the reasons why Shaw found it worthwhile to repeat the fact more than once, and may explain the poetical touch in his style when he tells us about the precious consequences of this fact. It is beneath low roofs, and few are humbler than the venerable one at Stratford, that the cradles of our greatest men were rocked: it is by poor firesides that their genius budded and expanded, and this is the reason why our literature, more than that of any other country, echoes the universal sentiments of the human heart, and speaks a language intelligible to every country and every age. (Shaw 121)

This goes well together with the opinion of Henry Austin Dobson, in his Handbook for English Literature, which was meant “to assist candidates in preparing for the Civil Service examinations” (v). For him, genius is characterized by an extraordinary strength, and an extraordinary will, surmounting barriers of all sorts. He presents Ben Jonson as the hero who, from the rank of a laborer, rose to the heights of honor: He began as a bricklayer,—turned soldier, actor, and dramatist successively, became laureate and pensioner under James and Charles, died poor, like most of his brethren, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, under the simple epitaph, ‘O rare Ben Jonson!’ cutso runs the story—at the instance and charges of a passerby. (Dobson 67)

A story, not from rags to riches, but from rags to honor. Not only the genius with his genial writing capacities is celebrated, but the genius who is able to survive under the most adverse circumstances, not letting himself be prevented from rising. This presentation of the English genius seems to mirror—in part—the fate of the English nation and the strength to overcome—and shows at the same time a great flexibility and openness. 4. Moral and Religious Values Literary Study was a natural vehicle for both entertaining and educating the masses by appealing to the innate powers of sympathy that guided their conduct and formed their imagination. Christians, particulalry, needed to be made aware of their social responsibilities and of the bonds they shared with all humanity. Literature in the service of altruism could accomplish that.26

This seems especially true for Chambers who wants to educate not only the intellect, but also the heart and the soul of his readers. Thus ethical _____________ 26

This is Maurice’s view about literature and its central importance, as Court presents it in his Institutionalizing English Literature.

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models are of special importance to him. A very high position as a model character is given, for instance, to Sir Philip Sidney as “a soldier and gentleman” (Chambers 27); he serves as the symbol of altruism—and in later literary histories this evaluation is repeated again and again. Female novel writers of the nineteenth-century like Opie, Edgeworth, Austin, Brunton, Hamilton and More he praises for “their refined and amiable morality” (Chambers 230). He even sees them as missionaries and saviours with the high ethical goal of improving mankind: “the novel was in a great measure redeemed from its ancient popular character of a narrative calculated rather to bewilder and mislead than to instruct or to improve the minds of ordinary readers” (ibid.). One can read their works both “with profit and amusement” (ibid.). Even if there is not much space reserved for them in comparison to male authors, Chambers initiates a tradition of esteem, especially for the women authors of the nineteenthcentury, that many of the historians of the nineteenth-century follow. What Craik in his literary history promotes as an absolute value is true humanity in the New Testament sense, a quality he finds most impressingly represented, for instance, in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.27 And it is genuine human kindness that Shaw also celebrates as a treasure in English literature—a quality which is not only desirable but which also guarantees universal appeal. It is above all Wordsworth whom he admires for his religious, social and moral theory and the huge influence “he exercised upon the literature of his country” (Shaw 521). He describes this influence “as far more permanent and powerful,” more powerful even than “the splendid innovations of Byron” (ibid.). There is no doubt that what he admires is above all moral superiority: for him, Wordsworth is a visionary, his doctrines “an attempt to anticipate this millennium of innocence and virtue” that civilization is not mature enough yet to live (ibid.). In some other respects, however, Shaw proves to be an outsider among the English literary historians of the nineteenth century. Although he wrote in Russia of his native country’s fame and glory with the zeal of a cultural missionary, he sometimes seems very progressive, cherishing quite different values—for example, cosmopolitism: Sterne particulary deserves our praise for the gentle and cosmopolite spirit which makes him perceive and appreciate the particular merits of other nations, and do justice not only to their arts and their triumphs, but even to the amiable peculiarities of their national character and manners. (33).

And he also admits that Sterne as a person transcends the usual: “Both as a man and as an author, there is in this truly original person such a union of apparently incompatible merits and defects, that it is impossible not to _____________ 27

See Craik, Sketches 214.

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feel our systems of moral and intellectual speculations completely at a loss, when applied to him” (329). For Spalding who is more outspoken than the other literary historians, “literature is necessarily a moral power, a power, modifying the character of mankind, and aiding in the determination of their position now and hereafter” (28). He not only urgently promotes the importance of literature but also formulates very clearly the necessity and consequence arising out of this: it is “a solemn and widely reaching truth, which ought also to teach every individual among us, how unspeakably important it is, that the books we read were wisely selected” (ibid.). His theory culminates in a hymn to God, a proof of his deeply religious and spiritual mind. It is, however, while reading Thomas Arnold’s literary history that one feels constantly preached to. Arnold is indeed a very didactic preacherteacher. He keeps praising, reproaching, encouraging, consoling, and always takes the stance of a minister telling his flock what is good or bad. And for Morley, who sees himself as a cultural missionary, morality is also the highest goal. He presents to his readers, among other values, a Victorian work-ethic28, an important pillar of Victorian ideology: “Chaucer enjoyed life and good fare, but the man of genius wins only by hard work a fame that is to live through many centuries” (Morley 147). The lesson is that everybody has to work hard, without exception: “Vor den Erfolg haben die Götter den Schweiß gesetzt” (Goethe). And there are plenty of examples which show that literature and literary judgment serve him to construct a high national ethic. In his attempt to turn his literary history into a collection of good examples for his readers, he was, of course, confronted with the fact that not all famous English authors were as personally exemplary and as moralizing and religious in their writings as Bunyan. Yet he generally solved the problem by selecting suitable parts of their works and by a partial interpretation. Under Morley’s pen even Shakespeare becomes a Puritan teacher of the nation who, especially in plays like The Merchant of Venice, makes us see the supreme importance of the moral sense of duty as the essence of true manliness: A man must exert all his powers; be the best and do the best that is in him to be or to do; give all that he has and hazard all: not making conditions of reward according to desert, not asking whether he shall be rich, or praised, or happy for the simple hearty doing of his duty; but doing it and taking what may come. (Morley 484)

It is also typical that Laing, for whom Byron was the greatest of English poets next to Shakespeare, expresses his regret that “throughout his works _____________ 28

Regarding the representation of Victorian work-ethic in Victorian literature see V. Nünning, Kulturgeschichte 199.

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there is an immorality of tone and a mockery of religious truth which renders his most fascinating works the most dangerous to young and unwary readers” (178). While in contrast, he praises Addison “for his teaching full of those lessons that make us wiser men and better members of society” (112) and presents him as the absolute and perfect ideal of an admirable personality, who can show the right way of living to youthful readers, the great ideal for Brooke is again Milton. He was, we read, great as an artist and great as personality “with a pure and lofty character,” and “he did not represent in any way the England that followed the tyranny, the coarseness, the sensuality, the falseness, or the irreligion of the Stuarts, but he did represent Puritan England, and the whole career of Puritanism from its cradle to its grave” (Brooke 123). 5. Aesthetic Values As is to be expected, in nineteenth-century literary histories there is hardly any direct exposition of the aesthetic values underlying the evaluation of authors and works. These values can therefore only be ascertained inductively from the excessive praise or condemnation we encounter, even if this should be often enough flowery and metaphorical. Here is an example from Craik: Sydney’s is a wonderful style, always flexible, harmonious, and luminous, and on fit occacions rising to great steadiness and splendour, while a breath of beauty and noble feeling lives in and exhales from the whole of his great work, like the fragrance from a garden of flowers. (3: 58)

We find quite generally that aesthetic evaluation is influenced more by moral judgments. Yet as becomes evident, their primarily moral stance did not at all hinder the Victorian literary historians from appreciating widelyknown aesthetic values as well. A pertinent instance is Collier’s literary history. His moral vein does not prevent his praise from occasionally being strongly determined by the ut pictura poesis principle, as in his characterization of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: Nothing could surpass the Canterbury Tales, as a series of pictures of the middle –class English life during the fourteenth century. Every character is a perfect study, drawn from the life with a free yet careful hand, - in effect broad and brilliant in colour, but painted with a minuteness of touch and a careful finish that reminds us strongly of the elaborate pencilling of our pre-Raphaelite artists, whose every ivry leaf and straw is a perfect picture. (Collier 56)

And this also shows, for instance, when Arnold shares Pope’s contempt of dullness: he not only disapproves of Gower’s works but also of eighteenth-century tragedies, in which he discovers “a virtuous ardour which

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savours of the dull” (2: 313), and he even quite generally characterizes the second half of the eighteenth century as a “coarse dull age” (348). How Brooke praises an author he esteems very highly can be gathered, for instance, from the way he deals with Chaucer: All the best tales are told easily, sincerely, with great grace, and yet with so much homeliness, that a child would understand them. Sometimes his humour is broad, sometimes sly, sometimes gay, sometimes he brings tears in our eyes, and he can make us smile or be sad, as he pleases. (45)

It was Saintsbury, however, who turned out to be the greatest promoter of aesthetic values: at the very ending of the nineteenth-century, at the peak of aestheticism in literature and art, he gave aesthetic values most importance in the evaluation of literary works. This coincided with the peak of imperial nationalism; the English had proved themselves as nation- and empire-builders, and they took pride in their “missionary” or imperial nationalism, based on a strong sense of national identity. They had conquered a quarter of the globe, and Saintsbury, as a literary historian, set out to conquer the field of the aesthetic by establishing style as the central value of literature. His attempt to make literary history livelier in this way proved successful—as is shown by the fact that his Short History of English Literature was reprinted in the nineteen-twenties, nineteen-thirties, and even in the nineteen-sixties. For him, the essence of literature is style, and the history of literature is “the ebb and flow of style” (Saintsbury xii). He therefore focuses on the work, not the author, and in the work on what he calls “the poetry.” He celebrates his acute judgment as a critic—and sometimes turns into a literary artist himself, when he characterizes a particular style, for example the prose of Thackeray: “His play on words, […] his broken sentences, the rapid zigzag turns of his thought and fancy, are all due, partly at least, to this intense excitement of brain, which overhears beforehand, as it were, the coming repartee, comment, annotation, and half annexes, half parries it ere it arrives” (746). What he cherishes and what his ideal of vivacity means is that “between Thackeray and his reader there is a constant pulse and current of sympathetic feeling and thought” (747). A sympathetic flow of feeling between the author and the reader–– this is what literary historians of the nineteenth century all want. They are not pure intellectuals who only want to speak to the intellect, and only appreciate intellectual challenges—they have different metaphors to live by; they want to open up the heart and open up the soul: they see a human being as a spiritual being and literature as an energy. As children of the twentieth century we are skeptical of their mission, their ideology. We know what has come out of the extreme nationalism mixed with racism and religion and the sense of being God’s chosen peo-

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ple, destined to lead others, to bring to other countries one’s own religion and world-view. We know what has come of the sense of superiority towards other nations. Of course, it helped the English nation to become a world power, a huge Empire, for some time. The English made themselves so great and the others so small—and for this created fitting metaphors to live by: we are the mother country and the others are the children. We are all one big family. And literature did its share to bring about our disillusionment. It showed that cruelty is blindness to the pain of the other, as Richard Rorty29 has pointed out––blind to the values of the other. It helped us see that the Victorians were largely blind––I would add––to the worth of the culture of others, their tradition, their world-view, their otherness. We know that what was well meant was not good. We know that they had the best intentions to serve the nation. It was one of the painful lessons of history. We do not want this extreme nationalism to occur again; knowing about the abhorrent consequences—we fight it; faced with the hegemony of national literary histories, we dream of a European literary history; we even dream of a history of world literature… But should such a history be like most of the more recent national literary histories? Should it exclude information on authors because they were declared dead by Roland Barthes in the nineteen-sixties? Should all emotional discourse be rejected altogether because it has been misused for nationalist ideology in the past? Why throw out the baby with the bathwater? Would it not be great if more of us used a language that is not amputated for the sake of a rather sterile illusion of objectivity? A language not robbed of its emotional appeal? Are we not dominated by technical metaphors and should we not change this? I trust there would be more readers if language were allowed by more critics to have a more human touch. Would this not be a sort of common sense that would help reach the so-called common reader? The literary

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“The books which help us become less cruel” are for Rorty books which help us see the effects of social practices and institutions on others” like “books about slavery, poverty and prejudice. […] Such books help us see how social practices which we have taken for granted have made us cruel.”(141) The second sort of books which helps us become less cruel is the sort “which help[s] us see the effects of our private idiosyncracies on others” (ibid.), for example “about the ways in which particular sorts of people are cruel to other particular sorts of people. Sometimes works on psychology serve this function, but the most useful books of this sort are works of fiction which exhibit the blindness of a certain kind of person to the pain of another kind of person” (ibid.).

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historians of the nineteenth century reached such a reader.30 Why don’t we try to do so too?

References Arnold, Thomas. A Manual of English Literature, Historical and Critical. London, 1862. Ernest Barker, ed. The Character of England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947. —: “An Attempt at Perspective.” The Character of England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947. 550-575. —: “Religion.” The Character of England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947. 56-84. Briggs, Asa. “Samuel Smiles, ‘The Gospel of Self-hood.’” Victorian Values:. Personalities and Perspectives in Nineteenth Century Society. Ed. Gordon Marsden. London: Longman, 1995 [1990]. 85-96. Brooke, Stopford. English Literature:. With Chapters on the Victorian Age. New ed., rev. and corr. New York: American Book Company, 1900 [1876]. Berkenhout, John. Biographia Literaria , or a Biographical History of Literature: Containing the Lives of English, Scottish and Irish Authors, from the Dawn of Letters in These Kingdoms to the Present Time. London: J. Dodsley, 1777. Casement, William. The Great Canon Controversy: The Battle of the Books in Higher Education. New Brunswick: Transaction, 1996. Chambers, Robert. History of the English Language and Literature. Edinburgh: Chambers, 1836. —: Cyclopaedia of English Literature; Consisting of a Series of Specimens of British Writers in Prose and Verse: Connected by a Historical Narrative. 2 vols. Edinburgh: Chambers, 1843-4. Collier, William Francis. A History of English Literature in a Series of Biographical Sketches (Appendix of American Literature). London, 1861. Court, Franklin E. Institutionalizing English Literature: The Culture and Politics of Literary Study, 1750 – 1900. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1992. Craik, George L. Sketches of the History of Literature and Learning in England: With Specimens of the Principal Writers. 6 vols. London, 1844-45. —: The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties. Illustrated by Anecdotes. 2nd ed. 3 vols. London, 1845. _____________ 30

The English classical authors who were recommended by Victorian literary historians were even called “poor classics” (in contrast to the classical authors of antiquity) because they were read by the lower classes. See Stierstorfer.

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Dobson, Henry Austin. The Civil Service Handbook of English Literature. London, 1874. Garrod, H.W. “Humour.” The Character of England. Ed. Ernest Barker. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947. 340-351. Grabes, Herbert. “The Canon Pro and Contra: ‘The Canon is Dead- Long Live Pick and Mix’.” Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 30 (2004): 35-49. —: “Literary History and Cultural History: Relations and Differences.” Literary History/ Cultural History: Force-Fields and Tensions. Ed. Herbert Grabes. REAL 17. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2001. 1-34. —: “‘Elect Nation.’ The Founding Myth of National Identity in Early Modern England.” Writing the Early Modern English Nation: The Transformation of National Identity in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth - Century England. Ed. Herbert Grabes. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001. 173189. Gross, John Jacob. The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: Aspects of English Literary Life since 1800. London: Weidenfels and Nicolson, 1969. Hall, Donald E., ed. Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Jacks, Lawrence Pearsall, ed. Life and Letters of Stopford Brooke. 2 vols. London: Murray, 1917. Jay, Gregory. American Literature and the Culture Wars. Ithaka: Cornell UP, 1997. Johnson, Samuel. The Lives of the English Poets; and a Criticism on their Works. 3 vols. Dublin: Whitestone, 1779 -81. Kohn, Hans. The Idea of Nationalism. New York: Macmillan, 1948. Laing, A. Frederick. A History of English Literature: New and Enlarged Edition. Collins School Series. London: William Collins, 1900 [1873]. Langford, Paul. Englishness Identified: Manners and Character, 1650-1850. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Marsdon, Gordon, ed. Victorian Values: Personalities and Perspectives in Nineteenth Century Society. 2nd ed. London: Longman, 1995. Maurice, Frederick Denison. Introductory Lecture at King’s College, London (1840), 71. Morley, Henry. A First Sketch of English Literature. London: Cassell, 1873. Morris, R.J. “Victorian Values in Scotland and England.” Victorian Values. A Joint Symposium of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the British Academy December 1990. Ed. T.C. Smout. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. Müller, Kurt. “Zwischen kulturellem Nationalismus und Multikulturalismus: Zur literarischen Kanondebatte in den USA.” Begründungen und Funktionen des Kanons: Beiträge aus der Literatur– und Kunstwissen-

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schaft, Philosophie und Theologie. Eds .Gerhard R. Kaiser and Stefan Matuschek. Heidelberg: Winter, 2001. 191-215. —: “Das Britische Weltreich als Familie: Empire Metaphern in der spätviktorianischen Lyrik als Denkmodelle und als Mittel der historisch-politischen Sinnstiftung.” Intercultural Studies: Fictions of Empire. Anglistik und Englischunterricht 58 (1996): 91-120. Nünning, Ansgar. “On the Englishness of English Literary History.” Critical Interfaces: Contributions on Philosophy, Literature, and Culture in Honour of Herbert Grabes. Eds. Gordon Collier, Klaus Schwank, and Franz Wieselhuber. Trier: WVT, 2001. 281-99. Nünning, Vera, ed. Kulturgeschichte der englischen Literatur: Von der Renaissance bis zur Gegenwart. Tübingen: A. Francke, 2005. —: “The Importance of Being English: European Perspectives on Englishness.” European Views on Englishness. Eds. Vera Nünning and Jürgen Schlaeger. European Journal of English Studies 8.2 (2004): 14558. Nünning Vera, and Jürgen Schläger, eds. European Views on Englishness. European Journal of English Studies 8.2 (2004). Pitman, J. “Recreation and Games.” The Character of England. Ed. Ernest Barker. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947. 445-61. Robinson, Lillian S. In the Canon’s Mouth: Dispatches from the Culture Wars. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997. Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Saintsbury, George. A Short History of English Literature. London: Macmillan, 1966 [1898]. Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Shaw, Thomas Budge. Outlines of English Literature. London, 1849. Sichert, Margit. “Henry Morley’s First Sketch of English Literature: Literary History as Cultural History.” Literary History/ Cultural History: Force-Fields and Tensions. Ed. Herbert Grabes. REAL 17. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2001. 257-78. —: “Functionalizing Cultural Memory: Foundational British Literary History and the Construction of National Identity.” Modern Language Quarterly 64.2 (2003): 199-217. —: “Implanting Literary History in Cultural Memory: Robert Chambers’ History of the English Language and Literature.” Literature, Literary History, and Cultural Memory. Ed. Herbert Grabes. REAL 21. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2005. 97-128. Sichert, Margit, and Herbert Grabes. “Literaturgeschichte, Kanon und nationale Identität.” Gedächtniskonzepte der Literaturwissenschaft: Theo-

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retische Grundlegung und Anwendungsperspektiven. Eds. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005. 297-314. Smout, T.C., ed. Victorian Values. A Joint Symposium of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the British Academy December 1990. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. Spalding, William. History of English Literature; with an Outline of the Origin and Growth of the English Language: Illustrated by Abstracts. For the Use of Schools and Private Students. Edinburgh, 1853. Sutherland, James. “Literature.” The Character of England. Ed. Ernest Barker. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947. 303–320. Stierstorfer, Klaus. Konstruktion literarischer Vergangenheit: Die Englische Literaturgeschichte von Warton bis Courthope and Ward. Heidelberg: Winter, 2000. Williams, T.P. “Religion.” The Character of England. Ed. Ernest Barker. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1947. 56-84. Williamson, J.A. “England and the Sea.” The Character of England. Ed. Ernest Barker. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947. 506-528.

MAX SAUNDERS (LONDON)

Impressionism, Fiction, and the Location of the Ethical This essay approaches the notion of “The Dissemination of Values through Literature and Other Media” by exploring a kind of literature, and the critical position associated with it, which in a sense tests the limits of that notion; which sets its face against value-judgments; which is based on the belief that the last thing writers should do, if they have any aspirations to be artists, is overtly to disseminate values by explicitly judging their characters or the actions of their characters. My argument reconsiders the doctrine, associated with the New Criticism of the mid-twentieth century that, in fiction, “showing” is preferable to “telling.” The New Critics, like the Modernists such as Eliot and Pound who helped to define their theoretical standpoint, take objectivity and concreteness of presentation to be superior to the subjective and indistinct, and prefer impersonal, dramatized rendering over the intrusion of authorial personality. However, I shall attempt to recontextualize this doctrine by reconsidering the literary history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More specifically, I shall be suggesting that we should reconsider it in relation to one term of literary history that has scarcely been in literary history at all, but the significance of which has only recently begun to be acknowledged by literary critics: Impressionism. One reason for making this claim is that it helps us to understand the configuration of writers I want to put together: Flaubert, Turgenev, James, Chekhov, Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, D. H. Lawrence, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, who all share a commitment to avoiding explicit moral commentary or judgment in their writing. Recent theoretical work on Literary Impressionism has emphasized perception; epistemology and phenomenology; this has tended to downplay the ethical.1 Thus what I am investigating here is the Ethics of Impressionism. How exactly can we describe this grouping of writers? They don’t form a coherent “school” or “movement.” One can’t even talk of a “line” of inheritance or influence. Lawrence, say, was very acerbic about Flaubert and Henry James. Joyce did things very differently from Chekhov or Conrad. Indeed, to place them all in one paragraph seems to go against all the received categories of literary history that is so heavily invested in Mod_____________ 1

See for example Armstrong, The Challenge and “The Epistemology.” See also Matz.

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ernism as an epistemological and aesthetic break from the past—a break with Romanticism and Realism and Victorianism. My interest in this topic grew out of my work on Ford Madox Ford, who provides perhaps the most sustained critical account of literary Impressionism we have, though it’s still relatively little-known—partly because what Ford does cannot always be reconciled with the New-Critical account of Modernism that was dominant for about forty years in the middle of the twentieth century. I have discussed Ford’s theory and practice of Impressionism elsewhere,2 so shall only make some brief remarks on Impressionism in relation to literary history here, before moving on to reconsider the showing/telling distinction in terms of Impressionism, and to conclude with an account of how the distinction figures in Ford’s Impressionist criticism. The main reasons why critics have been resistant to the concept of “literary Impressionism” in thinking about Modernism are probably a feeling that, advocating indistinctness, it is itself indistinct as a theoretical term; and also that historically, Impressionism is most often thought of as something which precedes Modernism. The writers in English who wrote most about “the impression” before Ford are figures such as Ruskin and Walter Pater. Writers like Henry James and Joseph Conrad, who also certainly used the term, and who have been called Impressionist, were themselves wary of the label.3 Literary History has tended to think of this kind of literary impressionism as something that turns into modernism in literature at about the time, or soon after the time, when pictorial Impressionism turned into Post-Impressionism, i.e., around 1910, when according to Virginia Woolf’s famous remark, human character changed; and one reason why she might have thought that was the First Post-Impressionist exhibition in London organized by her friend Roger Fry, in that year. So the literature that follows this period was called “Modernist,” beginning with works produced just before the First World War, or during it, or just after: the work of early Pound, early Eliot, early Lawrence, early Joyce, early Woolf. This is also the period of Ford’s best known, and most say his best, novel, The Good Soldier, of 1915. But Ford doesn’t call all this work “Modernist.” He goes on calling his own work, and that of James and Conrad, Impressionist. Of course he can see that the younger writers are doing things differently. But what he values in their work is the way they develop Impressionism; he’s rather wary of the more extreme avantgarde movements such as Futurism, Cubism, or Vorticism. _____________ 2 3

Saunders, “Modernism,” and “Ford, the City.” See Knapp Hay.

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It shouldn’t be surprising that he doesn’t describe such work, or his own or Conrad’s, as Modernist in his important credo of 1914, the essay “On Impressionism”, written while he was working on The Good Soldier. “Modernism” wasn’t a term used then by the people we now call “Modernists.” Robert Graves and Laura Riding’s A Survey of Modernist Poetry is usually credited with being one of the first uses of the term about literature—in 1927. (The Oxford English Dictionary omits their book, but cites a usage from the same year as its earliest example from the arts, describing painting.) Ford’s other most extended discussion of Impressionism comes eleven years after this, in his last book, The March of Literature (1938). Perhaps by then he was too old an Impressionist to change his spots; certainly, there too he’s still talking as if the most modern writing was still Impressionist.4 In some ways this position still seems counter-intuitive; or at least to gloss over some crucial differences between Realism, Naturalism, aestheticism, turn-of-the-century writing, and Modernism. On the other hand, traditional accounts of Modernism have not been good at accounting for the continuities. Nor at explaining why it was that critics in the 1930s seemed unembarrassed describing writers like Woolf and Chekhov as Impressionist.5 Ford’s map of modern writing is valuable in recovering this sense of a broader cultural movement. And it is one which places the idea that the writer should present with objectivity, without explicit judgment, at the center of its aesthetics. There are perhaps three main reasons why authorial judgments might be thought to detract from fictional narrative. First, they tend to interrupt the plot, and thus interfere with a reader’s engagement in the story; to distance the narrative from the characters and situations, rather than sustain illusionistic involvement. (We might note that already there’s a contradiction at the heart of the New Critical doctrine, since such distancing ought to produce the distantiation and objectification that New Criticism is supposed to admire. Perhaps it is rather that fictional narrative was antipathetic to the theory, which after all was founded upon, and generally better at analyzing, the ironies and tensions in short poems.) Second, and following from this, as authorial judgments distract attention from the story, they focus it on the personality of the author, who begins to appear rather as a character in his or her own right. However, and third, such judgments don’t just serve the purpose of filling out the character of the author, letting us understand his/her view of the world. They don’t just reveal a person, but a purpose. Of course this can be ion_____________ 4 5

See Poole. See for example Empson.

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ized. A dramatized narrator’s judgments are not the same as the author’s. Tristram Shandy’s views are not, or not always, Sterne’s. The implied author’s judgments need not be the same as the actual author’s. But as soon as we feel such judgments might be the author’s, or raise a question for us about what the author’s judgment might be, then we become aware of the work as having a moral intent. And this too is likely to distract from the sustaining of illusion. The classic treatment of the distinction between showing and telling is in many ways still Wayne Booth’s in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961). He cites the comment by the early Jamesian critic Percy Lubbock, who wrote in The Craft of Fiction (1921): “the art of fiction does not begin until the novelist thinks of his story as a matter to be shown, to be so exhibited that it will tell itself” (Lubbock 62; qtd. in Booth 8). The distinction is problematic, certainly. But before discussing Booth’s concerns about it, and suggesting others, we should historicize it, by asking why it emerges in the nineteenth century, and appears a significant distinction at that period. There are three aspects to emphasize. First, it can be seen as a counterpart in aesthetics to agnosticism; that is, as a narrative version of secularization. It is often urged against writers like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, who assert the persistence of religious experience just when so many Western Europeans were losing their faith. Rather than telling us what to think of his creatures, the creator should absent himself, and show the characters exercising their autonomy. It is thus a precursor to Existentialism’s stress on human freedom to create one’s own fate. There are, of course, celebrated statements of resistance to authorial intrusion much earlier. Though Impressionism, and the movement towards objectivity in fiction are championed from the late nineteenthcentury, the rejection of dogmatic moralizing is of course much older. In art it is present in early nineteenth-century Romanticism, as in Keats’s pleas for “Negative Capability,” and disinterestedness: We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle or amaze with itself, but with its subject. (Keats, Letters 43, 61)

It is at the same time that free indirect style, in which the author’s or narrator’s views recede impalpably behind the language of her heroines, makes its decisive appearance literature, in the works of Jane Austen. Keats knows that art has to have a design upon us. The artist wants to produce effects, move an audience, inspire pity or terror. The key word is “palpable.” If the design is too obvious, we become conscious of being manipulated; lose our sense of ourselves as free agents. This objection is reinforced by both enlightenment skepticism and romantic individualism.

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When society broadly agrees about, and enforces, a monolithic theologically-grounded morality then moral comment is unobjectionable. But the Romantic philosophy of mind, with its specter, solipsism, elicits a different response. I no longer necessarily feel your moral views as pertaining to me. They characterize you, are part of your subjective world. But I no longer feel bound by them. Of course, put like this, it goes back even further to Protestantism’s break with papal and episcopal authority, according to which the only true morality is the one that has been tested in our own souls, our own hearts. If “showing” represents a resistance to religious or moral coercion, then, it also (and this is the second aspect) represents another form of resistance: to political coercion. And this is by no means only a matter of resistance to conservative political pressures, but also to those of religion’s nemesis, revolutionary politics. Thus, for a politically ambivalent author like Ford, Impressionism aims for a form of liberal tolerance in the face of pressure to turn art into political propaganda. By the early twentieth century the balance has shifted, and the pressure to “tell” is more likely to come from socialist rather than religious doctrine; from the demands of politically engaged writers like Shaw, Wells, and Galsworthy; those Ford called “reformers.” This is what he means when he argues (in the essay “On Impressionism”) that art is threatened by what he calls “social preoccupation”: The point is really, I take it, that the preoccupation that is fatal to art is the moral or the social preoccupation. Actual preoccupations matter very little. Your cabman may drive his taxi through exceedingly difficult streets; he may have half-adozen close shaves in a quarter of an hour. But when those things are over they are over, and he has not the necessity of a cabman. His point of view as to what is art, good form, or, let us say, the proper relation of the sexes; is unaffected. He may be a hungry man, a thirsty man, or even a tired man, but he will not necessarily have his finger upon his moral pulse, and he will not hold as aesthetic dogma the idea that no painting must tell a story, or the moral dogma that passion only becomes respectable when you have killed it. (Ford, “On Impressionism” 271-2)

This is a more democratic version, perhaps, of the ability T. S. Eliot admired in Henry James not to let ideas become preoccupying and distorting dogmas: James’s critical genius comes out most tellingly in his mastery over, his baffling escape from, Ideas; a mastery and an escape which are perhaps the last test of a superior intelligence. He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it. (1-2)

These arguments that champion art’s independence from religious or political doctrine have already implied the third emphasis: that art should therefore be autonomous. Or, to put it another way, later nineteenthcentury writers came to feel that art’s position was between religious con-

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servatism and political radicalism; between right and left; between mysticism and dialectical materialism. But this developed from being a feeling of neutrality (or vulnerability, as when Turgenev was attacked by both the Slavophils and the Anarchists for his portrayal of Bazarov in Fathers and Children—showing without telling, if ever there was such a thing) into a feeling that art should be a law unto itself. This is the source of the ethos of “Art for Art’s Sake”, the Aesthetic movement. The trouble with the Aesthetes was that they wanted art to be a substitute religion; the religion of beauty; and they tended to preach it, drawing attention to the paradox by which the attempt to escape conventional ethical prescriptions led to another form of ethical injunction: a preaching against preaching. Aestheticism doesn’t just do beauty, or show it, it has to tell us what’s beautiful as it does so. If “showing” is defined in terms of a resistance to “telling” (or at least, to being told), it is itself susceptible of becoming just another form of telling. This is perhaps inescapable in criticism, in which the discursive predominates over the mimetic; but even insofar as it is manifested in a work, the injunction “thou shalt not preach” can seem like a more snobbish form of preaching. In saying this we have moved on to consider the possible objections against an aesthetic of “showing” as opposed to “telling.” These can perhaps be separated out into four related strands. First, the feeling that a form of bad faith is involved, as suggested above: that a resistance to moral or political advocacy turns into a counter-advocacy. According to this view, (and secondly) the advocacy of liberalism is sometimes seen as a case of even worse faith, in that a liberal hostility to preaching too easily becomes itself a form of preaching—surreptitiously, while pretending not to. While a liberal will claim that an injunction against injunctions is not symmetrical with what it opposes, and that objecting to intolerance is more magnanimous than what it intolerates, a Marxist will object that the liberal distrust of ideology is blind to its own ideologicality. Translated into aesthetic terms, this is tantamount to saying that an attempt at “objective,” disinterested presentation—at “showing” rather than “telling”—is a form of advocacy in spite of its ostensible foregoing of advocacy: an advocacy of liberalism. Third—and this is one of Booth’s objections—the privileging of “showing” over “telling” can be too crude a distinction for critical use. (Booth’s admiration for Henry James leads him to distinguish James’s from Lubbock’s more reductive view of these things.) For Booth it’s largely a matter of whether or not writers give objective insights into characters’ internal worlds of a kind we don’t normally have in life into other people’s minds. For example, when the narrator of the Book of Job tells us Job was “perfect and upright, one that feared God, and eschewed evil”

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he has “given us a kind of information never obtained from real people” (Booth 3). Booth resents the implication that writers who give this kind of information are inferior, less intelligent, than those who eschew it in favor of impartiality or impersonality. Modernism, of course, is famously seen as privileging the objective; as striving after concreteness, the “objective correlative” as a corrective to what it sees as Romanticism’s wallowing in subjectivity. Take the celebrated example from Joyce: The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic, like that of material creation, is accomplished. The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails. (214-5)

Yet to put it this way—that Modernism wants to replace subjectivity with objectivity—is to notice a curious paradox. For what is said to be wrong with writers who “tell” rather than “show” is that they offer judgments as objective. The narrator of the Book of Job does not say “he seems to me perfect and upright”; merely that he was so. So it’s not clear why this is a less objective mode of narration than one that shows Job’s qualities without summing them up judgmentally. Or perhaps the point is that we don’t like our objectivity to be owned by a particular subjectivity. A chief argument against “telling” (as suggested already about authorial judgmentality) is that it gets in the way of fiction’s sustaining of illusion. We stop seeing Job, and hear the narrator’s view of him. The subjective (the narrator’s view of Job) has interposed itself before the objective (Job’s self-evident qualities). But of course that notion of self-evidence implies a reader’s subjectivity. The subjectivity of the reader in whom the illusion is being sustained. (Impressionist criticism is arguably the first reader response theory.6) From this point of view, what happens when a narrator “tells” instead of “showing,” is an interposing of the objective in between a character and the reader’s subjectivity. In short, what’s wrong with telling (from this point of view) isn’t subjectivity but objectivity! Or at least, a disruption (due to the interpolation of the objective) in what is essentially an inter-subjective relation between writer and reader. Booth is aware of this problem, though he puts it rather differently, preferring instead to argue that the distinction between telling and showing is simply untenable: that all showing is also a form of telling. This is _____________ 6

For a discussion of Ford’s sustained attention to the nature and experience of reading, see Saunders, “Ford Madox Ford and the Reading of Prose.”

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the fourth, and probably the most damaging objection to the distinction. As he argues, writers who foreground “showing” don’t remove judgment altogether. You can’t. They just offer another kind of judgment, by selection and juxtaposition rather than explicit comment. He argues that “the line between showing and telling is always to some degree an arbitrary one”, because the author’s views are revealed as much by his choice of which story to tell as anything else: “Everything he shows will serve to tell” too (Booth 20). According to this view, the implicit morality and the explicit comment that an author makes, or could make, are the same. Henry James could say that Gilbert Osmond in Portrait of a Lady is a cynical manipulator, an evil exploiter of Isabel Archer’s innocence in order to get the money he wants. But he prefers to imply it, so as to tell the story from Isabel’s point of view; only letting Osmond’s full depravity become visible when it has become visible to her. Furthermore, James, Isabel, and the notional reader all agree. There’s no dispute about what the judgment is; just about when and how to make it; about how explicit it ought to be, and whose voice it should be made in. So far I’ve considered the injunction against “telling,” and contrasted it with possible objections to “showing,” without asking what ethical benefit “showing” might offer instead. Or how it is that literature which privileges “showing” might nonetheless have an ethical dimension. And in a case such as James’s we can see the first kind of defense of it. It presents the ethical as a specific, experiential process, rather than as summary dogma. The ethical is lived through rather than taught. [Incidentally, I think this is a possible answer to the question raised by Ronald Shusterman of how we might think the absolute and the relative together: by experiencing an unfolding ethical predicament.] But when we consider the case of D. H. Lawrence, the arguments become more complex. For Lawrence—and it is bound up with his ambivalent fascination with the psycho-analytic—the part of the mind which moralizes—what psychoanalysts call the superego—is in conflict with the parts that feel, sympathize, identify, experience—the ego and the id.7 So for Lawrence, when artists moralize explicitly on fictional characters, they are falsifying their imagination. The curious thing about art-speech is that it prevaricates so terribly, I mean it tells such lies. I suppose because we always all the time tell ourselves lies. and out of a pattern of lies art weaves the truth. Like Dostoevsky posing as a sort of Jesus, but most truthfully revealing himself all the while as a little horror.

_____________ 7

See Saunders, “Lawrence, Freud and Civilisation’s Discontents.”

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Truly art is a sort of subterfuge. But thank God for it, we can see through the subterfuge if we choose. Art has two great functions. First, it provides an emotional experience. And then, if we have the courage of our own feelings, it becomes a mine of practical truth. We have had the feelings ad nauseam. But we’ve never dared dig the actual truth out of them, the truth that concerns us, whether it concerns our grandchildren or not. The artist usually sets out—or used to—to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist’s and the tale’s. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it. (Studies 8)

This idea that artists cannot but mangle their materials would be depressing, but for Lawrence it is a sign of the best art that the sheer breadth and openness of a work of art is the thing that militates against whatever designs the artist might have on it, or on us: “Every work of art adheres to some system of morality. But if it be really a work of art, it must contain the essential criticism on the morality to which it adheres” (Lawrence, “Study of Thomas Hardy” 476). The problem is precisely one of the relation between “adherence” and “containment”; since the morality a work of art “contains” is the morality it tells us. The morality it “adheres to” is perhaps best understood as that which it shows us, or “enacts” in a non-didactic way. For it was an essential feature of Lawrence’s view of the novel that though artists may include their attempts to tell us morality, their works of art are greater than the sum of such parts: The novel is a great discovery: far greater than Galileo’s telescope or somebody else’s wireless. The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute. In a novel everything is relative to everything else, if that novel is art at all. There may be didactic bits, but they aren’t the novel. (“The Novel,” 416)

The greatness of art for Lawrence is inextricable from this ability it has to precisely to “contain” any attempts at moral interference. Its complex interrelations serve to set any attempts at didacticism in a context which reveals their limitations. Though of course the danger—of which Lawrence was all too aware, as can be seen in the following image of aesthetic resurrection—is that the championing of art as something that inoculates us against didacticism can turn it into another form of mysticism: The novel is the highest example of subtle inter-relatedness that man has discovered. Everything is true in its own time, place, circumstance, and untrue outside of its own place, time, circumstance. If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail [...]. When the novelist puts his thumb in the scale, to pull down the balance to his predilection, that is immorality. (“Morality” 528)

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This is what he thought of Tolstoy and his Christian Socialism; Hardy and his pessimism; or Flaubert and his “intellectual desperation” (ibid.). There you have the greatness of the novel itself. It won’t let you tell didactic lies, and put them over. Nobody in the world is anything but delighted when Vronsky gets Anna Karénina. Then what about the sin?—Why, when you look at it, all the tragedy comes from Vronsky’s and Anna’s fear of society. The monster was social, not phallic at all. (Lawrence, “The Novel” 417)

According to Lawrence, then, what’s wrong with “telling” is that it tells the wrong thing. It either substitutes a part for the whole; or it seeks to negate the truth of the whole. The teller can’t be trusted to tell the truth about the tale, because the kind of telling that society expects—telling people what to think morally about it—fundamentally disapproves of passional experience. Of course, here too there is an implicit value judgment in the withholding of judgment. The passional life is better than an attempt to repress passion in the name of social or religious morality. We can see here a second kind of defense of “showing” as opposed to “telling.” For Lawrence, it helps us get at the truth of our experience, by escaping the moralist who wants to distort it. However, we might notice too that in the example he gives of Anna Karenina, he introduces something different from the two arguments that the artist shouldn’t give moral interpretations within the story, or that any such interpretations will be in tension with the story. This is because (apropos the first argument) Tolstoy doesn’t condemn Anna and Vronsky explicitly. Rather than saying they are being punished for adultery, he affixes the problematic epigraph from Romans, 12:19: “Vengeance is Mine, and I will repay.” This is surely already profoundly ambivalent. It can be read as saying “Adultery is always punished by divine intervention”—and thus what seems like Anna’s suicide under the train is in fact the inexorable mechanism of divine retribution. Or it can be read as saying: “It’s not for you humans to judge people: leave it to me.” Rather as the Princess Varvara says: “it’s for God to judge them, not for us” (Tolstoy 651). Apropos the second argument, Lawrence doesn’t say that Tolstoy incorporates a moral commentary that is at odds with his tale. (After all, as I’ve suggested about the epigraph, any moral commentary is highly equivocal.) Instead, it’s the working out of the tale itself that he is objecting to: the tragic outcome; as if Tolstoy’s tale is already divided against itself. (Though, as Lawrence’s comment recognizes—“Why, when you look at it, all the tragedy comes from Vronsky’s and Anna’s fear of society”—Tolstoy may have been a great enough artist to show characters in the grip of their confusion that social pressures are transcendental ones, even despite his own hope that they were transcendental moral strictures

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rather than purely social ones.) And to say this is to acknowledge once again that the ethical is inseparable from the narrative. It isn’t just how you tell a story, or whether you tell or show it; it is also a matter of the kind of story you tell or show. That is, the choice of material, the shaping of a plot into a particular direction or ending is already an ethical action, the enacting of moral decisions. Lawrence preaches his relativism with absolute conviction. With Ford, whom I want to consider in the final section of this essay, we have something different. He starts with a categorical frame, but the certainties vaporize as soon as we place them under the critical spotlight. It’s partly because he chooses as his example for a discussion of Impressionism, the author he always thought of as its antithesis: Thackeray. I quote at some length since it’s not only one of Ford’s most brilliant accounts of Impressionism, but such a good example of how his critical imagination is energized by his creative (and recreative) imagination: The main and perhaps most passionate tenet of impressionism was the suppression of the author from the pages of his books. He must not comment; he must not narrate; he must present his impressions of his imaginary affairs as if he had been present at them. Thus, the following—imaginary—passage from Vanity Fair would not be impressionism. Disgusting as we may find it, on crossing to the window our heroine— whom the reader must acknowledge to be indeed a gallant little person— perceived Captain Crawley and the Marquis of Steyne engaged in a drunken boxing bout. […] But such things must be when to the moral deterioration of illicit sex passion is added the infuriating spur of undue indulgence in alcoholic beverages. But it would have been impressionism had the author written: In the street the empurpled leg-of-mutton fist of a scarlet heavy dragoon impinged on the gleaming false teeth of a reeling bald-headed senior. Becky screamed as a torrent of dark purple burst from the marquis’ lips to dribble down his lavender silk waistcoat. That ended, as she spasmodically recognized, her life of opulence. The dragoon, an unmoving streak of scarlet, lay in the gutter, one arm extended above his unshako-d locks. That would be an impressionist paragraph. It will be noted that here the author is invisible and almost unnoticeable and that his attempt has been, above all, to make you see. It is presented rather than narrated because all that you get are the spectacle of the affair and the psychological reaction of one of the characters […] moral-drawing comment would take away from the vividness and entirely destroy the verisimilitude of the scene. The moral drawing is all done with the words “That ended […] her life of opulence.” […] And the reader can be left to draw the extremely obvious moral that an impecunious adventuress […] must be guilty […] of imprudence, or of hideous moral turpitude, according to the temperament of the reader. (Ford, March 767-8)

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How does an Impressionist write criticism? Obviously not by telling us what to think about literature, exactly, but by subjectivizing it, like this: recreating it imaginatively in order to show us technical differences. Note, also, how, as a critic, Ford still resists telling us Thackeray’s moral. He says it’s “extremely obvious.” But as soon as he begins to verbalize it, it becomes fissile, and splits into two rather different judgments. Is Becky to be reproved for not being good enough at social climbing and calculation? Or for being immoral? Ford attributes this split to differing readers, but of course it also pertains to differing characters within the novel. The first is closer to how Becky would judge herself; the second, to how her critics or lover would judge her. As so often in Ford, a moment that looks like an awkwardness, an aporia, actually reveals something important. In this case, a third kind of defense of “showing,” which is that the judgment it enables is a more complex, more responsible one, recognizing the intersubjectivity of the ethical. Thackeray consistently figures in Ford’s accounts of the novel as an example of what Impressionism shouldn’t do. In 1911 (in an essay on his collaborator Joseph Conrad) he gives a marvelous account (years before those comments of Lawrence’s) of how what’s best in Vanity Fair is the way Becky Sharp escapes from the designs Thackeray might have for her: There is a great writer of another school—W. M. Thackeray. Thackeray is the Prince of Comment. Now the effect of his books is very curious. There is a matchless character called Becky Sharp. In Brussels, Miss Sharp takes the bit between her teeth. She gets away from Mr. Thackeray. For pages and pages the author just lets his character go on acting. He presents, in fact. We keep on saying again and again: How wonderful she is! How wonderful she is! And then, suddenly, when she is at the height of her achievement, there is a crack like the backfire of an automobile. Mr. Thackeray has come into it. It is positively true. He bursts into Brussels to say that he is a very moral gentleman who disapproves of his puppet. And then, instead of seeing Miss Sharp’s red hair any more, we see a tall gentleman with a leonine head, a broken nose, and an odd smile. And we say politely, “How clever you are Mr. Thackeray.” That without doubt was what Thackeray wanted. It is an aim like another; it is very nice to extort from thousands of readers ejaculations as to one’s cleverness and sound morality, and thousands and thousands of readers want that sort of thing. But the problem before Conrad when he wrote Lord Jim was to present to us a fair-haired capable son of an English parsonage, waiting in his white canvas tennis shoes upon a boat stage in the sun for the approach of the boat— and of inscrutable and august Destiny. (Ford, “Joseph Conrad,” Critical Essays 84-5)

This implies a fourth defense of “showing”: the idea that “telling” tends towards morally repugnant self-congratulation, smugness. (It is really a sub-set of the objections to authorial judgments as obtruding the author

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between character and reader; but adds the idea that such display is liable to narcissism.) Ford introduces this discussion of Thackeray, as he also did in the later book, as an example to illustrate how not to do impressionism. But something strange happens to his language here too when he tries to tell us (rather than show us) what it is exactly that Impressionism does do. But that is enough of morals; let us consider Conrad’s methods […]. There is one technical maxim that jumps at the eye all through his work. It is this: Never state: present. And again: Never state: present. I am aware that these words will not be understood by the majority of my readers; I will try to make the meaning plain. The self-appointed work of an artist of Conrad’s type is to make each of his stories an experience for his reader […]. (Ford, Critical Essays 83)

When he takes the discussion up later, he shifts the terms along, as if that will help the majority of his readers understand what he calls the “technical phraseology”: And yet this does not really exhaust the matter—for, of course, statements must be used; indeed, paradoxically, the author of this school has nothing to use but statements. And perhaps, more exact statement of the maxim (for the words “Never state: present!” are a sort of slang of technical phraseology), perhaps an exact lay rendering of the maxim would be “Never comment: state.” For the point that has to be made is that what this type of artist has to avoid is an intrusion of his own personality into the current of his work. He has to be persuasive; he is like a man trying to catch a horse in a field. Before him he stretches out, a sieve containing corn; behind his back he conceals a halter. The story is the corn in the sieve; the halter is the author’s comment. If the horse-reader perceives merely the end of it 8 his mind is away up the field. (“Joseph Conrad,” Critical Essays 84)

From one point of view, it hardly clarifies things to say that “Never state” means the same as “state!” The attempt to distinguish stating, presenting, and commenting seems in fact if not to make them all collapse into one term, to problematize the distinction. However, part of the distinction remains clear enough: what the impressionist should avoid is commenting —saying what he thinks, or telling his readers what they should think. But the problem is to find a way of stating or presenting that doesn’t also seem to comment; precisely, to find a way of showing that isn’t also a way of telling. This might sound like accusing Ford of muddle. And assuredly it wouldn’t be the first time he’d been accused of that. But there are two ways in which apparent conceptual confusion might betoken rapidity of practical intelligence. First, the hesitation over the terms might be seen as evidence that his fictional instincts were racing ahead of the critical lan_____________ 8

Like Booth, Rimmon-Kenan also argues that fiction cannot escape “showing”—since prose narrative has to narrate; but that as narrative can take many forms, it can assign higher or lower values to description.

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guage of the day; that he was precisely aware of the problem, even if he couldn’t describe it in a way that would satisfy Hans Robert Jauss or Terry Eagleton. Second, that’s the point of that wonderful last image of the man trying to catch a horse. It’s typical of Ford’s Impressionist criticism again that he clinches a point not with a theoretical, logical argument, but with a novelistic vignette—one which immediately deepens the problem, in this case by revealing that creating the impression of “showing” rather than “telling” is an illusion; one which depends as much on what you don’t show as on what you do. To some philosophers or theorists this might seem like an evasion of ethical rigor. But I want to argue that it’s an avoiding of ethical rigor mortis instead. And to conclude, by offering this as the ultimate defense, not just of the ethics of “showing” rather than “telling,” but, if it were needed, of literature itself as a better disseminator of the ethical than philosophy or theory: because it’s able to capture the speed, agility, temporality, volatility, liquidity—in short the radically unsystematic nature—of actual ethical experience. The Impressionist principle of showing rather than telling, then, isn’t an evasion of the ethical. Ford isn’t arguing that the author shouldn’t write narrative. But that the narrative he thinks works best is one where the reader isn’t aware of the author as a person (like Thackeray), with a “personality” which can become a distraction from the characters and issues in the story, and muddy the ethical waters there. The Impressionist approach to ethics in literature is thus to focus on the ethics of the act of narration rather than the ethical content within the narrative, or ethical judgments made about that content. Ford wants to free the ethics of the narrative from the person of the author. Of course as he knew from Conrad’s use of the narrator Marlow, or his own use of John Dowell as narrator of The Good Soldier, the use of a first-person intra-diegetic narrator complicates the issue. But even when the narrator “tells” rather than “shows,” the author is showing the narrator: presenting him without authorial comment. So here too the author’s own personality is suppressed; partly so as to create space for such narrator-characters to show themselves as they tell their stories.9 _____________ 9

Compare the 1935 essay “Techniques,” in which Ford wrote of his collaboration with Conrad: “We evolved then a convention for the novel and one that I think still stands. The novel must be put into the mouth of a narrator—who must be limited by probability as to what he can know of the affair that he is adumbrating. Or it must be left to the official Author and he, being almost omnipotent, may, so long as he limits himself to presenting without comment or moralization, allow himself to be considered to know almost everything that there is to know. The narration is thus a little more limited in possibilities; the ‘author’s book’ is a little more difficult to handle. A narrator, that is to say, being already a fictional character, may indulge in any prejudices or wrong-headednesses and any likings or

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As he had said earlier about Conrad: […] The Secret Agent is a much more direct story than any that Mr. Conrad has yet given us. For that reason it takes a very high place as a work of art. And those who are not interested in works of art—those who seek to make Art the servant of the Republic—will find it a work of great informative value. It casts a great deal of light upon a very obscure problem, since it is the work of a novelist who is a very exact scientist—of an imaginative writer who, having been given by the gods the gift of seeing life, has, with tremendous effort, evolved a method of rendering it. It is over such work that the Artist and the Moralist find in astonishment their hands meeting and then is made clear the obscure saying that ‘Every work of Art has a profound moral significance.’ It has. Because every work of art is a true rendering of a human instance, and every human instance has a profound moral significance for you, me, and the man selling papers at the corner. (Ford, “Literary Portraits: VIII. Mr. Joseph Conrad,” Critical Essays 39)

Impressionism, then, which places its emphasis on pictorial, visual description rather than the narration of action, and sets its face against telling, may appear to cut loose from ethics. But it does so in order to achieve a greater ethical plenitude. Where Derrida located the problematics of language in a fantasmatic prioritizing of speech over writing, Impressionism sees sight as cognitively and morally superior to hearing. Such a strategy is itself open to deconstruction. Nevertheless, as a technique it aims above all “to make you see”; but that seeing is always already ethical, since what you see isn’t just visible surface, but life; “a very obscure problem”—i.e., an ethical problem. What is wrong with the kind of summary judgment Job’s narrator makes, then, isn’t that it offers knowledge only an omniscient god could really have, but that it is too restrictive to capture the complexity and provisionality of human feelings—as indeed Job’s story bears out. Omniscience may be of little comfort to beings who must acquire knowledge or wisdom sequentially, as in a narrative. In Ford’s memoir of his friend and collaborator, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, he gives a narrative example of how our ethical vision evolves as narrative, and how Impressionism is especially attuned to its vibrations and uncertainties: it became very early evident to us that what was the matter with the Novel, and the British novel in particular, was that it went straight forward, whereas in your gradual making acquaintance with your fellows you never do go straight forward. You meet an English gentleman at your golf club. He is beefy, full of health, the moral of the boy from an English Public School of the finest type. You discover, gradually, that he is hopelessly neurasthenic, dishonest in matters of small change,

_____________ dislikes for the other characters of the book, for he is just a living being like anybody else. But an author-creator, presenting his narration without passion, may not indulge in the expression of any prejudices or like any one of his characters more than any other; for, if he displays either of those weaknesses, he will to that extent weaken the illusion that he has attempted to build up” (Ford, The Good Soldier 298).

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but unexpectedly self-sacrificing, a dreadful liar but a most painfully careful student of lepidoptera and, finally, from the public prints, a bigamist who was once, under another name, hammered on the Stock Exchange. […] Still, there he is, the beefy, full-fed fellow, moral of an English Public School product. To get such a man in fiction you could not begin at his beginning and work his life chronologically to the end. You must first get him in with a strong impression, and then work backwards and forwards over his past. […] That theory at least we gradually evolved. (129-30)

Such a man would have been classified as a “bounder” or “cad,” or as morally depraved or degenerate according to conventional Victorian moral standards. This Impressionist version, by contrast, starts off by telling, but soon exfoliates into showing, and as it does so, begins to assemble a story which is, approximately, the story of Ford’s own pre-war masterpiece, The Good Soldier. At the heart of Impressionism’s investment in “showing,” then, is this sense that monolithic judgments are inadequate to human moral complexity. It is a modern sense of human intricacy, which seeks understanding rather than condemnation. When it’s done well, it enables a clearer vision of ethical issues than we could otherwise get. It enables us to sneak past the censor (rather as Freud said daydreams enabled the unconscious to do), to grasp a problem in all its complexity. Yet Fordian Impressionism also adumbrates a paradox at the heart of the distinction between “showing” and “telling.” Though writing is verbal before it can be visual, impressions can, well, give the “impression” they are being shown. But to show their sequence you have to cast them into narrative; into telling. And of course, the ambiguity in the very term, “telling”—telling us a story or a moral; telling us what to see, or telling us what to think about what we see—is as convenient to the novelist as it is misleading to the critic. Though you can reduce narratorial intrusiveness by eschewing judgmentality, the presentation can never entirely escape the agency of the presenter. Which perhaps explains why for Ford (as for Wayne Booth after him) the terms tend to dissolve into each other (as good impressions should) even as he tries to distinguish them.

References Armstrong, Paul B. The Challenge of Bewilderment: Understanding and Representation in James, Conrad, and Ford. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987. —: “The Epistemology of Ford’s Impressionism.” Critical Essays on Ford Madox Ford. Ed. Richard Cassell. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961. Eliot, T. S. “In Memory of Henry James.” Egoist 5 (1918): 1-2.

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Empson, William. “Virginia Woolf”. Argufying. London: Chatto and Windus, 1987. 443-49. Ford Madox (Hueffer) Ford. “Literary Portraits: VIII. Mr. Joseph Conrad.” Tribune 14 September 1907. 2nd Rpt. in Critical Essays. 36-9. —: “Joseph Conrad.”, English Review 10 (December 1911): 68-83. Rpt. in Critical Essays, 76-90. —: “On Impressionism.” Poetry and Drama 2 (June 1914): 167-75, 323-34. Rpt. in The Good Soldier. Ed. Stannard. 257-74. —: The March of Literature. 1938. London: Allen and Unwin, 1947. —: Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance. London: Duckworth, 1924. —: “Techniques”, Southern Review 1 (July 1935): 20-35. Rpt. in The Good Soldier. 285-300. —: The Good Soldier. Ed. Martin Stannard. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995. —: Critical Essays. Eds. Max Saunders and Richard Stang. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2002. Graves, Robert and Laura Riding. A Survey of Modernist Poetry. London: Heinemann, 1927. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975. Keats, John. “Letter to George and Tom Keats, 21, 27 (?) December 1817.” Letters of John Keats: A new Selection. Ed. Robert Gittings. Rpt. with corr. London: Oxford UP, 1975. 41-3. —: “Letter to John Hamilton Reynolds (February 3, 1818)”, Letters 60-2. —: Letters of John Keats: A New Selection. Ed. Robert Gittings. Rpt. with corr. London: Oxford UP 1975. Knapp Hay, Eloise. “Impressionism Limited.” Joseph Conrad: A Commemoration. Papers from the 1974 International Conference on Conrad. Ed. Norman Sherry. London : Macmillan, 1976 Lawrence, D.H. Studies in Classic American Literature.1923. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. —: “Morality and the Novel.” 1925. Phoenix. Ed. Edward D. McDonald. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978. 527-32. —: “The Novel.” 1925. Phoenix II. Ed. Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978. 416-26. —: “Study of Thomas Hardy.” Phoenix. 398-516. Lubbock, Percy. The Craft of Fiction. London: Cape, 1921. Matz, Jesse. Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Poole, Roger. “How Should We Read Ford?” Ford Madox Ford and “The Republic of Letters.” Eds. Vita Fortunati and Elena Lamberti. Bologna: CLUEB, 2002. 181-93.

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Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London: Methuen, 1983. Saunders, Max. “Modernism, Impressionism, and Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier.” Études Anglaises 57.4 (2004): 421-37. —: “Ford, the City, Impressionism and Modernism.” Ford Madox Ford and the City. International Ford Madox Ford Studies 4. Ed. Sara Haslam. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. 67-80. —: “Ford Madox Ford and the Reading of Prose.” Diss. University of Cambridge, 1986. —: “Lawrence, Freud and Civilisation’s Discontents.” D.H. Lawrence Review 27.2-3 (1997-98): 269-88. Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenin. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.

ANNETTE SIMONIS (GIESSEN)

Ethics and Aesthetics in Modern Literature and Theory: A Paradoxical Alliance? 1. General Reflections and Historical Aspects of the Topic When I had just finished writing my contribution to this collection of essays on Ethics in Culture, I incidentally happened to hear a talk by the bestseller author Dan Brown on his recent novel The Da Vinci Code on the radio. Interestingly, some of the comments of the author on his work had an amazingly intense ethical emphasis. The book and the production of the movie have apparently caused a great deal of controversy about moral and religious aspects. It has been regarded as an offence by conservative groups of orthodox Christians, because some of the characters in the novel believe that Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalen were married and had a child. In the course of events the protagonists, Professor Langdon and Sophie Neveu, are involved in the task to solve the strange murder of the renowned curator Jacques Saunière who was murdered in the Louvre. Step by step the main characters and the readers discover that the solution of the mystery is intricately connected with the tradition of the Holy Grail and to a mysterious society called the Priory of Sion. If one takes into account that Brown’s book is primarily a thriller, and perhaps also a fantastical and historical novel, it seems rather far-fetched and even somewhat ludicrous to assume that it seriously challenges Christian belief. Dan Brown might have answered that he had written a work of fiction which is by nature ambivalent and which offers multiple perspectives etc. He might easily have rejected the idea that his novel was teaching any religious or ethical doctrine. Instead, however, Dan Brown takes up some of the ethical implications the Da Vinci Code is supposed to imply and enlarges on them with a lot of emphasis, which is quite amazing and in some respects symptomatic, insofar as the author apparently reacts to the supposed expectations of a larger reading public: “My hope in writing this novel was that the story would serve as a catalyst and a springboard for people to discuss the important topics of faith, religion, and history.”1 _____________ 1

From the author’s webpage at http://www.danbrown.com/novels/davinci_code/ breakingnews.html (13 Nov. 2007).

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Thus, Brown comments on topical issues, such as, for instance, hidden feminist perspectives supposedly expressed by his story: [Question:] ‘This novel is very empowering to women. Can you comment? [D. B.:] ‘Two thousand years ago, we lived in a world of Gods and Goddesses. Today, we live in a world solely of Gods. Women in most cultures have been stripped of their spiritual power. The novel touches on questions of how and why this shift occurred…and on what lessons we might learn from it regarding our future.’2

Obviously there is some degree of self-stylization in Brown’s talk, since he assumes the role of the critical author who, like Galileo and Darwin, challenges traditional errors. A serious assumption is implied—though the tone may be humorous and half-ironical: “A very wise British priest noted in the press, recently: ‘Christian theology has survived the writings of Galileo and the writings of Darwin, surely it will survive the writings of some novelist from New Hampshire.’”3 Even if this role may be merely a marketing strategy, this would be symptomatic and revealing in itself. The gesture of challenge seems to work well—at least commercially. There seems to be a specific need in contemporary culture, to which Brown’s popular fiction responds by offering the readers a new mythology and a paradigm of ethics which may best be characterized by a simple polarization of good and evil; a reduction of far more complex modern ethical views. Still, the controversial response to Brown’s thriller raises the question of whether ethical views can indeed be encoded in works of fiction or not, and in which ways those ethical perspectives can be deciphered by contemporary readers and become operative. The question of whether literary texts are liable objects to transmit ethical values is a question open to debate. In early modern times the belief in a moral or ethical function of literature was quite common and asserted much more emphatically than nowadays; to some authors it even seemed beyond doubt. One might, of course, quote Horace’s idea of prodesse et delectare, which assumes an implicit alliance between a moral or social dimension and the aesthetic value of literature. Works of art in general and poetry in particular were supposed to comprise an ethical dimension which legitimated them as useful things. Indeed, Medieval and Renaissance texts still furnished ideal representations of human behavior and the various distortions of those ideals, as examples of virtue and vice. Yet this mode of disseminating values in literary texts was always only one _____________ 2 3

Ibid. Live audio on the author’s webpage at http://www.danbrown.com/novels/davinci_code /breakingnews.html (7 Mar. 2007); Dan Brown himself talking about the controversy surrounding his novel.

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technique of representation among numerous others, a clear cut mode of contrasting images coexisting with more complex and subtle forms of writing or artistic expression. In modern literature, in the wake of romanticism and symbolism, the notion of literary texts offering models of human behavior as exempla virtutis or negative examples of vice became obsolete, and is thus to be considered a largely pre-modern notion of the role of literature. Where the idea of ideal or model behavior was re-established as a crucial function of literature in the twentieth century, as for instance in the program of socalled “socialist realism” (‘sozialistischer Realismus’) it proved to be an obstacle for the authors involved rather than an inspiring element of poetics. Christa Wolf’s texts, for instance Nachdenken über Christa T. (‘Reflecting about Christa T.’), illuminate the heavy strain on an intelligent authoress working within a normative socialist frame. The awareness of a moral responsibility as well as the authority of the author (not to be confused with an explicit didactic function) is poignantly stated in the notion of the poets being “unacknowledged legislators of the world” mentioned by the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in his “Defence of Poetry” in 1821 (508). Shelley enlarges on the eminent role in society he ascribes to the poetic writer, when he points out the anticipatory dimension of literature: “Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts on the present” (ibid.). At first sight, one might regard the exaggerations and the hyperbolic expressions quoted above as juvenile fantasies obviously overrating the function and social significance of poetry. Yet Shelley is more accurate and precise when he enlarges on the mental operations and subconscious processes stimulated by the poetic imagination. The Defence also includes examples of more subtle and sophisticated argument, which becomes most evident when Shelley illustrates that there exist multiple perceptions of a work of art and that there are multiple modes of response to the same literary text: “The drama, so long as it continues to express poetry, is a prismatic and many-sided mirror” (ibid. 491). In romantic theory a vivid or creative imagination is considered an essential precondition of moral judgment and sensibility (compare Shelley 487-488), yet it is not “moral” in the conventional sense of the word. Shelley’s concept of identification via the imagination is not to be confused with traditional notions of sympathy and compassion. Moreover it is very different from the idea of sympathetic involvement which Gotthold Ephraim Lessing explores in his famous re-interpretation of Aristotelian poetics in the Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767-1769).

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Apart from the element of logical argument, the style and rhetoric of Shelley’s poetic diction deserve further critical attention: The prevalent metaphors and the imagery employed by the author in order to describe the imaginative approach are indeed revealing for they suggest a passionate sensual experience rather than rational thought or judgment. The language is highly suggestive of the notion of aesthetic energy. Compare for instance the observation that “poetry is a sword of lightning ever unsheathed which consumes the scabbard that would contain it” (Shelley 491). The dynamics of poetical evolution is illustrated by the recurrent metaphor of revolution and by the frequent use of military imagery: At length the ancient system of religion and manners had fulfilled the circle of its revolutions. And the world would have fallen into utter anarchy and darkness, but that there were found poets among the authors of the Christian and chivalric systems of manners and religion, who created forms of opinion and action never before conceived; which, copied into the imaginations of men, became as generals to the bewildered armies of their thoughts. (Ibid. 492-493)

In his Defence of Poetry Shelley thus focuses on an energetic concept of involvement which is based on sensuality and passion rather than on emotion and sentiment. In this context it is revealing that he regards Milton’s Satan as a moral agent superior to God, since Satan seems the perfect embodiment of passion and pure energy. (Compare ibid. 498)4 Shelley’s Defence with its dense layer of poetic imagery invites ambivalent interpretations in several respects. Are the forms of poetic energy presented in the text metaphors of revolutionary thought? Or are they the expression of a sensualist perspective? Or both? When Shelley exalts the process of intense imagining, he comes close to Keats’s notion of poetic intensity, a quality which is to the latter a criterion of artistic excellence. In a letter to his brothers George and Tom on _____________ 4

Shelley is one of the great admirers of John Milton’s Paradise Lost among the romantic poets and offers a remarkable re-interpretation of the Devil in Milton’s epic, which is inspired by William Blake’s sympathetic reading: “Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan as expressed in ‘Paradise Lost’. It is a mistake to suppose that he could ever have been intended for the popular personification of evil. Implacable hate, patient cunning, and a sleepless refinement of device to inflict the extremist anguish on an enemy, these things are evil; and, although venial in a slave, are not to be forgiven in a tyrant; although redeemed by much that ennobles his defeat in one subdued, are marked by all that dishonors his conquest in the victor. Milton’s Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his God, as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture, is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy, not from any mistaken notion of inducing him to repent of a perseverance in enmity, but with the alleged design of exasperating him to deserve new torments. Milton has so far violated the popular creed (if this shall be judged to be a violation) as to have alleged no superiority of moral virtue to his God over his Devil. And this bold neglect of a direct moral purpose is the most decisive proof of the supremacy of Milton’s genius.” (Shelley 498)

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21 December 1817 he explains his conception of intense aesthetic experience: “The excellence of every art is in its intensity capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with beauty and truth. Examine ‘King Lear’, and you will find this exemplified throughout” (40). Intensity, however, constitutes an aesthetic quality which is not necessarily linked to ethical implications by nature. This circumstance becomes even clearer and more evident, when Keats continues his letter by expounding his poetic theory of “negative capability.” [S]everal things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. (Selected Letters 40)

Significantly, the idea of “negative capability” implies a temporary suspending of judgment which enables the poet to transcend the limits of the self in a quasi-mystical way and which inspires the aesthetic imagination. The romantic concepts of intensity and poetic imagination deliberately cross the boundaries between the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of the reader’s mental response and cognition. Shelley, for his part, looks back approvingly on Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy, which was written more than two centuries before and published in 1595. In his Defense, Sidney argues that the poet’s writings are far more intriguing and persuasive than the historian’s or the philosopher’s works because of their imaginary appeal and force and because of their rhetorical and metaphorical or pictorial structure: Now doth the peerlesse Poet performe both, for whatsoever the Philosopher saith should be done, he gives a perfect picture of it by some one, by whom he presupposeth it was done, so as he coupleth the generall notion with the particuler example. A perfect picture I say, for hee yeeldeth to the powers of the minde an image of that whereof the Philosopher bestoweth but a wordish description, which doth neither strike, pearce, nor possesse, the sight of the soule so much, as that other doth. (140)

In the context of this argument Sidney does not only appreciate the imaginative and creative work of the poet but in passing also touches on the ethical dimension of fiction: No doubt the Philosopher with his learned definitions, be it of vertues or vices, matters of publike policy or privat government, replenisheth the memory with many infallible grounds of wisdom, which notwithstanding lie darke before the imaginative and judging power, if they be not illuminated or figured forth by the speaking picture of Poesie. (Ibid. 140-141)

It is one of the poet’s tasks to illuminate the abstract comments of the philosopher on virtues and vices, public and private behavior, by forceful

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poetic descriptions and visual metaphors. According to Sidney, the visual and rhetorical appeal of the fictional author seems more attractive to the readers and therefore more instructive than theoretical theses. Sidney’s position is on the whole rather self-confident and highly optimistic about the lasting influence of literature or fiction and on its social and ethical function. Yet modern writers and theorists have become more skeptical and less self-confident as to the social impact of literature. For other authors the value of literature does not consist in any kind of ethical or educational dimension. The primary function of literature seems to be entertainment, not edification. Since the emergence of the modern book market in the course of the eighteenth century the success of a book is no longer a question of aristocratic protection. The transactions on the market are at least partly dependent on the publishers who assess the probable success of a book according to their own notions and criteria and also dependent on that part of the reading public who disposes over the money to by books and the leisure to read them. Thus, to a certain degree the reading public decides which books will be successful. The tastes and expectations of the readers, however, are not easy to define, because they are by nature heterogeneous and varying. Ethical criteria seem to play a minor role on the book market, although literary criticism seems to be more conservative in this respect. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries literary critics more often than the authors themselves refer to ethical values when appreciating a text or disapproving of a book. The reactions of the common readers are however far more elusive than those of the critics, and their motivations for buying a book can only be guessed. Some modern authors, like Oscar Wilde, even deny that books can be estimated according to ethical criteria at all. For Wilde, literary value is a question of style and of the writer’s skill: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all” (The Picture of Dorian Gray iii). It is not only the possibility of communicating social and moral values but also the necessity of doing so that is called into question in the course of the nineteenth century. Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, who developed the new role of the poète maudit, deny the idea that the poet or writer in his or her creative work should be restricted to any boundaries of social norms and moral values. Or, to quote Oscar Wilde again: “No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything” (The Picture of Dorian Gray iii). This new interpretation of authorship is confirmed and elucidated on the level of literary theory by Georges Bataille’s concept of transgression, for instance in La littérature et

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le Mal ( “Literature and Evil”).5 Bataille revives and further elaborates an idea which is already touched upon by Keats. In following the creative task and the guidance of the imagination, according to Keats, the poet cannot be restricted by ethical evaluations: What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation. A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually in for —and filling some other Body––The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute—the poet has none; no identity—he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s Creatures. (147)

Polyphony, multiple perspectives and ambiguity are characteristics of modern literature which on the whole exclude the transmission of a stable, normative set of values. Often modern authors seem to deliberately refrain from affirming the social norms and conventions inherent in their own society (thus avoiding easy accommodation or triviality). An implicit moral awareness and a latent ethical view are however still present in diverse forms of specifically modern writing, in the critical stance, the satirical mode, the ironical reflections, the oblique and indirect forms of social criticism which are typical of many modern texts. If we have a closer look at our emotional and intellectual response to literature, it becomes obvious that ethical values are by no means the principal criteria in literary texts, when stimulating the reader’s sympathy and involvement. The structural analysis of drama has contributed to a better understanding of how empathy is created in the spectators or readers of a play by dramatic technique and how it is directed in the course of the dramatic action. Research on the so called “manipulation of response” has revealed that the distribution and evolution of audience response is quite a sophisticated process (compare Honigmann, Habicht/Schabert). In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, for example, the audience’s attitude towards the protagonist is not only, not even dominantly, influenced by an ethical evaluation of character. On the contrary, studies of the manipulation of response in Shakespeare’s plays have shown how the techniques of asides and extensive soliloquies succeed in creating a certain complicity between the audience and the characters, a form of empathy which in the case of Macbeth leads the spectators to a partial identification and sympathy with a morally dubious figure. This form of empathy, once established by subtle dramatic techniques, is not easily interrupted or destroyed; in Macbeth it needs the brutal murders of Banquo and Lady Macduff to disengage and distance the audience or readers from the protagonist. The fabric of liter_____________ 5

Also compare Sollers; Connor.

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ary texts is highly complex and sophisticated, often inviting ambivalent and conflicting responses on the part of the reader. (In narrative texts one could elucidate a similar phenomenon with reference to focalization.) 2. The Paradox of Ethics and Aesthetics in the Works of Oscar Wilde My first modern example is drawn from late nineteenth century literary history, from the period of aestheticism and fin de siècle. The poetics of l’art pour l’art provide an interesting case of a complex, in part highly paradoxical, relation between aesthetics and ethics in modern literary texts. At first sight one encounters a considerable tension between the aestheticist claim of constructing an autonomous sphere of art, in which formal aspects predominate, and the attempt of social or moral critique. Thus, in his Preface to the Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde provocatively notes that “all art is quite useless” (Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray iii). Furthermore, the author decidedly rejects any kind of moral involvement, yet ironically he refers to such a commitment as being a superfluous mannerist stylistic element: “No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style” (ibid.). In the preface to Wilde’s novel ethics and aesthetics seem to be diametrically opposed. The description of ethics is confined to the semantics of literary texts. Wilde’s skepticism against an ethical dimension of literature partly stems from a deep-rooted aversion to any didactical purpose: “The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself” (Epigrams 135). According to Wilde it is not only a sign of bad taste but also a proof of the lack of imagination, if one simply adopts a given system of values: “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative” (ibid. 122). Underneath the superficial code of Victorian morals Wilde discovers a certain fear of originality. Therefore he writes in his poetic dialogue The Critic as Artist in 1890: “The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius” (Critic as Artist 95). Lord Darlington, one of the main personages in Wilde’s play Lady Windermere’s Fan, published in 1892, voices a similar moral indifference: „It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious. I take the side of the charming, and you, Lady Windermere, can’t help belonging to them” (Lady Windermere’s Fan I, vi.). Though these comments on the function of art and on social ethics are not altogether to be discarded as polemical exaggerations, Wilde modifies and revises the implications of his purely aestheticist notions of art in several ways. Oscar Wilde’s figure of the artist as critic suggests a successful blending of both aspects: the implicit moral view of the satirical writer and the

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aestheticist search for artistic perfection. The attempt to integrate aspects of social criticism within an overall aestheticist approach culminates in Oscar Wilde’s self-projection of the author as a remarkable combination of playful, artistic traits and critical attitudes. The figure of the critical intellectual widespread in the 1970s seems to be an effective re-embodiment of aestheticist criticism, yet in a more serious appearance. Moreover, in Wilde’s poetics, the Victorian claims of realism and authenticity are replaced by the new conception of a precise imagination. According to Wilde the detailed description of imagined experience expected of the author closely resembles the task of the historian: “To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture” (The Critic as Artist 110). In Wilde’s texts as in modern literature on the whole the ethical dimension, if present at all, is inscribed into the texts in an indirect way, as a latent form, which is to be discovered by the readers when embarking on a careful process of deciphering: The comedies (in the tradition of the “comedies of manners”) present social criticism through comical satire and caricature. The perspective created by the playful satirical view in Oscar Wilde’s comedies, however, has a shifting focus, not being restricted to one person or a certain group of characters nor concentrating mainly on one protagonist in order to expose him to ridicule, as is the case in many of Molière’s comedies. Wilde’s readers may indeed feel at a loss when looking for a stable framework of values. Instead they are invited to laugh about the fictional objects of satire as well as about themselves and are animated to construct their own criteria of aesthetic and ethical evaluation. It seems an advantage of modern literature that modern authors avoid supplying the readers with a coherent system of ethical values. They rather explore the multiple and divergent ways in which social values and ethical motives may become operative. Instead of providing any clear solutions, they inspire the reader to set out on a process of reflection, sorting out his or her own answers to the given problems and conflicts. The approach to values in aestheticist and modernist literature is by nature a tentative and fragmentary one, transferring the act of interpretation and of evaluation largely to the reader who is now given a crucial part in the constructing of sense and in the creation of the work of art. In The Soul of Man under Socialism, however, Wilde expresses a more explicit moralistic attitude, as he criticizes the superficial social morals of the late Victorian era. To him it seems rather absurd of his contemporaries to demand of the poor that they practice economy, since they have nothing to spare anyway:

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But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. For a town or country labourer to practise thrift would be absolutely immoral. Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal. He should decline to live like that, and should either steal or go on the rates, which is considered by many to be a form of stealing. (Wilde, The Soul of Man 10)

Wilde’s outspoken attack on Victorian notions of virtue undermines a set of established values by revealing their inherent absurdity and their deficiency since they are obviously applied to conceal social injustice. With this example of social criticism Wilde ex negativo voices a social commitment: suddenly and almost inadvertently he introduces an ethical dimension into his writings. Of course one might argue that the Soul of Man under Socialism forms part of a different literary genre than Wilde’s fictional texts, his comedies and novel, because it is to be regarded as a genre in-between fiction and philosophical essay. Yet the ambivalence mentioned above is not only due to a question of genre. Wilde seems indeed divided between an aesthetic point of view and a social and moral awareness. Interestingly, disobedience is the only virtue whose anthropological and historical significance Wilde clearly acknowledges. He does not only recommend dissidence to the poor and the working class, but also points out the historical relevance of the principle of rebellion and disobedience in general. Wilde recommends this kind of negative virtue, because in accordance with Marxist criticism he considers it a vehicle of progress: We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives. Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it. As for being discontented, a man who would not be discontented with such surroundings and such a low mode of life would be a perfect brute. Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. (The Soul of Man 9-10)

Oscar Wilde thus resorts to a mode of dissidence:6 he chooses a negative perspective in regard to the established system of Victorian ethics and prefers to assume an attitude of discontent which clearly signals an implicit evaluation, instead of endorsing a positive, concrete set of values. _____________ 6

This dimension of Wilde’s writing has been brilliantly elucidated by Dollimore with reference to sex and gender in his seminal study. The theme of dissidence and gender in the Victorian age is further discussed by Dellamora.

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This negative, indirect way of expressing an ethical viewpoint proves to be a new and seminal paradigm in modern literature and theory. In modern literature the negative expression of ethical views or social criticism often goes together with rather unexpected forms of hermetic style. This sudden comeback of opacity and hermetic expression in modern literature seems to be the sophisticated answer literature offers on a formal level to a complex problem of culture and society respectively. 3. Dissidence and Negativity as Expression of Latent Ethical Perspectives in Modern Cultural Theories: Adorno—Foucault—Greenblatt It strikes me as significant that modern literature and literary theory refrain from formulating ethical tendencies in positive terms, which implies more than just an evasive strategy. Thus the presence of ethics in modern literature takes on the form of an absence or negativity—in Theodor W. Adorno’s sense. Often the ethical outlook or perspective in modern literature and theory is articulated by a mode of dissidence, revocation, negativity, deviance and subversion, and not in positive terms. This applies especially to sophisticated, self-reflexive forms of modern literature, yet also to some forms of art in popular literature and culture. Literary and cultural theory (in the wake of unorthodox Marxism) shows less naivety and a greater modesty in regard to the claim of literature being a cultural medium suitable for transporting ethical values. When contemplating the evolution of social or cultural theories since the second half of the twentieth century one realizes a certain absence of explicit ethical thought, if not a general lack of ethical reflection. The German sociologist Max Weber already referred to such a development in his essay “Der Sinn der ‘Wertfreiheit’ der soziologischen und ökonomischen Wissenschaften” (‘The Significance of Value-Freedom of Social and Economical Sciences’), published in 1917. This general tendency in modern theory applies notably to Niklas Luhmann, who has dedicated elaborate studies to the system of economy, the system of politics, of jurisdiction, of art and mass media, and even of religion, yet obviously left out the analysis of any ethical or moral system in society apart from a minor essay on ethics as a reflection of morals. The lack of a moral dimension on the level of the great subsystems of society in system theory is itself revealing and symptomatic of modern theoretical thought. Moreover it is explicitly underlined by a remark attributed to Luhmann saying that “Werte sind wie Luftballons” (‘Values are like balloons’). The emergence of modern cultural and social theories like that of Niklas Luhmann and Michel Foucault to some degree seems to have cre-

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ated an ethical vacuum on the level of theory. Or does there exist in such recent cultural theories as those mentioned above a latent form of ethics beneath the surface level of descriptive terms and diction? (This is, of course, more or less meant to be a rhetorical question to which the answer, I suppose, is “yes.”) If we follow Michel Foucault, institutional authority and individual power have been replaced by a powerful network of numerous discourses which have a formative function in society. Especially in the middle and later works of Foucault, in Discipline and Punish and in the History of Sexuality, the human subject is no longer considered to be autonomous, but rather secretly directed by mental and discursive forces beyond the scope of his or her control.7 Foucault’s analysis of the modern prison system constitutes a more or less explicit criticism of the Enlightenment. Instead of corporal punishment, modern prison systems exert control over the prisoners’ minds. Bentham’s construction of a central watchtower surrounded by many isolated cells, the so-called Panopticon forms an ideal architecture of supervision. The imprisoned have the impression of being permanently watched and controlled in their actions. Thus the Panopticon is a metaphor of the Enlightenment practice and disciplinary impulse which according to Foucault is also inherent in institutions of education and in hospitals as well as in modern society at large. Prisoners, schoolboys, patients, mentally ill and socially deviant people alike are subtly subjected to and modeled according to the concepts of late Enlightenment by a series of disciplinary strategies. In Foucauldian theory, the modern subject is to a certain degree constructed as a result of socialization, education and disciplinary processes. Ethics, it seems, on the surface level of theory, has become a question of discourse as well as a question of the distribution and transmission of the elements of discourse; not of individual judgment. Yet it would be a misunderstanding to consider Foucault simply as a postmodern opponent of the Enlightenment, his criticism rather constitutes a form of internal critique. In his essay “Qu’est-ce que les lumières” (‘What is Englightment?’) he underlines the significance and importance of enlightenment as a historical process which has not yet come to an end and looks back on Immanuel Kant approvingly as one of his theoretical predecessors. In spite of the overall descriptive approach in Foucault’s writings, there seems to be a notable ethical and political stance in the work of the French philosopher which has not been overlooked by Fou_____________ 7

A thorough analysis of Foucault’s theory of power is presented by Honneth in his illuminating study The Critique which also includes interesting chapters on Theodor W. Adorno and Jürgen Habermas.

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cault’s readers and adherents. In Germany, Foucault’s works, notably Surveillir et Punir (Discipline and Punish) have thus been read on the line of unorthodox Marxist criticism, at least they have been attributed to the political left wing—in contrast to Niklas Luhmann’s theory, which was often (mis)interpreted as conservative or even reactionary. The turn to discourse in modern cultural theory marks, of course, a noticeable breach with the Western tradition: Whether in Christian ethics or in classical philosophy, in stoical ethics for instance, the notions of individual responsibility and of morally sensitive behavior on the grounds of individual decisions have been prominent. In the major works of Foucault, by contrast, one experiences a remarkable shift from the individual to the larger social forces at work, notably on the level of discourse. One might at first sight assume that Foucault and other modern cultural theorists develop a new form of political ethics which has more or less replaced individual ethics and traditional moral codes by transferring the problem to the social system and its operative networks at large. Yet this does not prove to be altogether true. Some of Foucault’s smaller essays (such as “Qu’est-ce que les Lumières?”) and interviews express the idea of individual self-control and the possibility of developing a critical attitude towards social phenomena with a confidence that is quite astonishing and remarkable. Social structures and discourses are by no means irreversible. Therefore, to Foucault self-reflection still seems to be a means of gaining further insight and a remedy to amend the misuse of power. As he explains in his essay “Qu’est-ce que les Lumières?” there exists a fundamental relation of the subject to his- or herself which proves vital in a community, especially in regard to ethical thought and action, “l’élément d’un sujet qui serait défini par le rapport de soi à soi” (Foucault, Dits et écrits, II, 339). When introducing this self-reflective mode that characterizes human beings Foucault points out a self-centered communication of the human subject which is to a certain degree circular, yet at the same time indispensable for the definition of a legal and active subject. It is an intellectual quality as well as a characteristic closely linked to the elemental necessity of survival: Bref, en tout ceci vous voyez que, dans cette pratique du soi, telle qu’elle apparaît et se formule dans les derniers siècles de l’ère dite païenne et les premiers siècles de l’ère chrétienne, le soi apparaît au fond comme le but, le bout d’une trajectoire incertaine, et éventuellement circulaire, qui est la trajectoire dangereuse de la vie. (Ibid.)

The discovery of the self-reflective individual by the Ancients is regarded as a decisive turning point in the tradition of intellectual history exclu-

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sively present in Occidental culture by Foucault, who does not try to avoid a Eurocentric view in this respect: Je crois qu’il faut bien comprendre l’importance historique que peut avoir cette figure prescriptive du retour à soi, et surtout sa singularité dans la culture occidentale. Parce que si on trouve, d’une façon assez claire, assez évidente, ce thème prescriptif du retour à soi à l’époque dont je vous parle, il ne faut pas oublier deux choses. (Dits et écrits, II, 339)

On February 17, 1982, Foucault elaborated this idea in a lecture entitled (Se)conduire,(se)gouverner: étique et politique at the Collège de France in Paris, in which he also drew attention to the philosophical and existential necessity of working out a new ethics. The ethical perspective would be indispensable for contemporary political and sociological thinking because it could supply the missing link between the individual and the theory of political power: Alors que la théorie du pouvoir politique comme institution se réfère d’ordinaire à une conception juridique du sujet de droit, il me semble que l’analyse de la gouvernementalité—c’est-à-dire: l’analyse du pouvoir comme ensemble de relations réversibles—doit se référer à une éthique du sujet défini par le rapport de soi à soi. Ce qui veut dire tout simplement que, dans le type d’analyse que j’essaie de vous proposer depuis un certain temps, vous voyez que: relations de pouvoirgouvernementalité-gouvernement de soi et des autres-rapport de soi à soi, tout cela constitue une chaîne, une trame, et que c’est là, autour de ces notions, que l’on doit pouvoir, je pense, articuler la question de la politique et la question de l’éthique. (Foucault, (Se)conduire,(se)gouverner: étique et politique)8

In this context Foucault underlines the need for contemporary thought to revive the idea of the cultivation of the self, “le souci de soi,” (which was prominent in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy). Aestheticist writers and modern philosophers alike have attempted to explore such relations of self-reflection which might constitute the basis for a modern ethical perspective and for the restitution of the self-control of human subjects. However divergent and contradictory those attempts might seem, they do not seem altogether futile, but rather are meant to be steps within a larger historical process which might gradually restore self-reflection and subjective control: Que vous preniez, par exemple, Stirner, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, le dandysme, Baudelaire, l’anarchie, la pensée anarchiste, etc., vous avez là toute une série de tentatives tout à fait différentes les unes des autres bien sûr, mais qui, je crois, sont toutes plus ou moins polarisées par la question: est-ce qu’il est possible de constituer, reconstituer une esthétique et une éthique du soi? A quel prix, dans quelles conditions?9

_____________ 8 9

Quotation from http://1libertaire.free.fr/Foucault53.html (n. pag.). Ibid.

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Yet in Foucault’s opinion the desired ethical perspective is still absent from contemporary society and hopefully to be developed in the future. Despite of the exuberant references to liberation and authenticity which seem omnipresent on the surface level of contemporary discourse and culture, the words are strangely devoid of meaning. Foucault comments on the further implications of this strange loss of semantic precision and content: Enfin il y aurait là, je crois, toute une question, toute une série de problèmes qui pourraient être soulevés. En tout cas, ce que je voudrais vous signaler, c’est tout de même que, quand on voit aujourd’hui la signification, ou plutôt l’absence quasi totale de signification, qu’on donne à des expressions, pourtant très familières et qui ne cessent de parcourir notre discours, comme: revenir à soi, se libérer, être soi-même, être authentique, etc., quand on voit l’absence de signification et de pensée qu’il y a dans chacune de ces expressions aujourd’hui employées, je crois qu’il n’y a pas à être bien fier des efforts que l’on fait maintenant pour reconstituer une éthique du soi.10

When envisaging the designing of a personal ethics as a new task of cultural theory in the months before his death, Foucault still adhered to his critical outlook and negative mode in outlining his object. Where he comes closest to suggesting a system of ethics in positive terms, as a given set of values, is in his descriptions of ancient Greek and Roman thought, i.e., classical philosophy and stoical thought. There seems to be on Foucault’s part at least a certain amount of identification with those ideals, which may seem surprising if one considers how far the ancient societies are detached from our contemporary social structures. Yet Foucault seems to be somewhat uncertain and ambiguous in his remarks about the main period and the precise historical scope of the self-reflective mode. Although its origins may be rooted in Greek and Roman antiquity, Foucault does not hesitate to consider the process of self-reflection and “culture de soi” as a decisively modern form and behavior, which is still inspired by the dynamics of the Enlightenment and its positive influence. Thus Foucault affirms confidently: Deuxièmement, je crois qu’il faut aussi remarquer que le thème du retour à soi a sans doute été, à partir du XVIe siècle, un thème récurrent dans la culture ‘moderne’. Mais je crois qu’on ne peut pas ne pas être frappé, aussi, du fait que ce thème du retour à soi a été au fond reconstitué—mais par fragments, par bribes—dans une série d’essais successifs qui ne se sont jamais organisés sur un mode aussi global et continu que dans l’Antiquité hellénistique et romaine.11

Of course, the scope of individual ethical decisions seems to be far more limited in modern or post-modern cultural theories, since according to _____________ 10 11

Ibid. Ibid.

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those designs of society and culture the individual human beings always move, act and communicate within a given framework of notions, discourse and key concepts which are hard to transcend or call into question. Still, an influential critic among the representatives of Cultural Poetics, namely Stephen Greenblatt, has recently postulated a relative autonomy of art, which might accord to literature and art a regulative function. Greenblatt demonstrates this by referring to a historical example. Peripheral phenomena like the Shakespearean theatre obviously reflect on the center of Elizabethan society and thereby discover the hidden dynamics of power. According to New Historicism, poetic texts contribute to the circulation of social energy. The term “energy” is revealing because it draws attention to the fact that in some partly mysterious ways Greenblatt tends to attribute to art and poetical works a charismatic quality. In his collection of essays published under the title “Resonance and Wonder” Greenblatt describes a reaction of the reader which is quite similar to that of a person confronted with some object of the sublime, as it was described by Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century: By resonance I mean the power of the object displayed to reach out beyond its formal boundaries to a larger world, to evoke in the viewer the complex dynamic cultural forces from which it has emerged and for which as metaphor or more simply as metonymy it may be taken by a viewer to stand, by wonder I mean the power of the object displayed to stop the viewer in his tracks to convey an arresting sense of uniqueness, to evoke an exalted attention. (170)

An ethical awareness in post-structural and recent cultural theory becomes moreover manifest in the controversy about the possibility of counterdiscourses and subversion. The discussion focuses on exploring the scope and function of deviant and marginal views. Can such elements of discourse which deviate from the mainstream exert a subversive influence or are they simply integrated and subsumed in the overall structure without having any particular effect? Significantly, Greenblatt has introduced the key terms of “subversion” and “containment” in order to delineate a dialectical principle in literary text and to define a polarized field in which literary works become operative. It seems a matter to be discussed on the level of the individual text by the method of close reading (an individual choice of the author perhaps) as to whether a text tends more to the pole of containment or subversion. Greenblatt explores this by reading and re-examining Shakespearean tragedies like King Lear or Hamlet. Another representative of implicit ethical thought in literary and cultural theory is the German philosopher Theodor Adorno, whose seminal study Die Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectic of Enlightenment) was written

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during the American exile in 1944 in collaboration with Max Horkheimer. In his later work, notably in the Aesthetic Theory, Adorno explores the hidden link between aesthetics and ethics by analyzing human creativity as an expression of utopian desires. Adorno’s starting point, on which he bases his argument, is the recent catastrophe of the Second World War and the dark foil of the holocaust. Culture, education and “Bildung” seem to have missed their aim of transmitting the ideals of humanity completely. As a spontaneous reaction to this deplorable situation, Adorno concludes that “All culture is rubbish.” The ideals of the Enlightenment have been reversed and distorted. There is no easy way of retrieving traditional ethics after the Nazi-regime and the Shoa. Yet, Adorno soon revised his primary notion of absolute aesthetic and creative abstinence. Though presented in a dialectical form which is difficult to read and almost impossible to translate into English or any other language,12 he has discovered an interesting mode of linking and reconciling the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of art and literature. According to Adorno, works of art serve as symbols of the modern subject who could not articulate him- or herself adequately without the help of aesthetic communication.13 Perhaps one could discover a certain renaissance of aestheticist thought in his approach—since the author expounds a few notions which are familiar to those taken from the essays of Oscar Wilde. Adorno develops a subtle notion of aesthetic autonomy which is dialectically linked to the idea of art as a product of society, a fait social. Moreover his preoccupation with the artistic dimension of literature and art, his focus on the pre-eminent aspect of form, reveals the aestheticist nature of his theoretical concepts.14 Significantly, it is on the level of aesthetic form (on the level of rhetoric and metaphor), not of semantics, that Adorno finds the indication of an implicit ethical quality in literary texts which at the same time constitutes the legitimization of art and literature within the framework of his theory. The utopian or moral awareness of art is transported by its formal characteristics, by its polyphony, its hermetic quality and its ambivalence, thus signaling its nonconformity. The only possible response of the contemporary author or artist is a retreat from the super_____________ 12 13 14

An interesting and valuable introduction to Adorno’s works in English is provided by Thomson. See also the comprehensive studies by Huhn, The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, and Gibson. Different perspectives and interesting views on this aspect of the Aesthetic Theory are offered by the following collection of essays: Huhn, The Semblance. I have discussed this interesting intertextual relationship between modern philosophy and nineteenth century aestheticism in more detail in my recent study: Simonis, Literarischer Ästhetizismus (chapter 8 and 9). Also compare: Simonis, “Ästhetizismus und Avantgarde.”

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ficial post-industrial society, which Adorno derogatively termed “Kulturindustrie” (‘culture industry’). In his Aesthetic Theory, it is the task of literature and art to redefine a utopian sphere beyond utilitarian rationality in order to retrieve the lost dignity of human beings. The artist succeeds in this mission insofar as he can create symbols and signs of liberation and reconciliation, which also express the confrontation with reality by a broken structure and an incomplete form. The modern author can only be successful in this task by taking into account possible failure. Contingency becomes a key word in this context because it is a characteristic trait of modern art. In so far as works of art are generated by an aesthetic process which includes moments of contingency, they reflect on the irrational, incalculable and repressed aspects of social communication. Adorno expresses this in a sentence which cannot be adequately translated into English, but only paraphrased, as I have attempted above: “Die ästhetisch aktuelle Figur solcher Paradoxie ist der Zufall, das mit der ratio Nichtidentische, Inkommensurable als Moment der Identität selber” (57). Thus in his notion of the work of art the negative qualities of disrupted form, incompleteness, fragmentation and failure are converted into positive symbols of hope and transformed into aesthetic signs of utopian desires. In contemporary literature and theory the ethical dimension has become even more elusive than before, yet at the same time the suggestions which point to the presence of ethical aspects, hidden though they may be, are quite prominent and recurrent. Evidently, modern aesthetic and cultural theory tends to locate the claim to an ethical perspective within the formal side and the aesthetic components of art and literature. In this respect, modern theoretical approaches look back on the elaborate romantic concepts of the imagination. Thus Adorno’s notion of negativity is strikingly similar to Keats’s concept of “negative capability,” as it is explained in a letter to Richard Woodhouse, October 27, 1818. (Compare Keats, Selected Letters 147: “If then he has no self, and if I am a Poet, where is the Wonder that I should say I would write no more?”) The concepts of ethics in literary and cultural theory so far discussed may indeed seem abstract and partly speculative. Yet they are nonetheless revealing and relevant to the problem of ethics in culture, because, firstly, the notions drawn from the theories mentioned above often contribute to our implicit and un-reflected presuppositions when discussing the topic. And secondly they help us to understand the complexity of the problem and gain insight into the diverse levels and possible meanings implied when writers, artists, sociologists and philosophers discuss the ethical dimension in literature and culture.

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References Adorno, Theodor W. Ästhetische Theorie. Eds. Gretel Adorno and Wolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1979. Bernstein, Jay M. The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993. Brown, Dan. The Da Vinci Code. New York: Random House, 2005. —: “LIVE AUDIO –– Dan Brown Talks About Writing The Da Vinci Code and the Controversy Surrounding the Novel.” http://www.danbrown.com/novels/davinci_code/breakingnews. html (07.03.2007). Connor, Peter. Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000. Dellamora, Richard. Victorian Sexual Dissidence. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Dollimore, Jonathan. Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. Oxford: Oxford UP,1991. Foucault, Michel. Surveiller et punir. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. (English Translation: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.) —: “Qu’est-ce que les lumières?” Dits et écrits II, 1976-1988. Paris: Gallimard, 2001. —: (Se)conduire,(se)gouverner: étique et politique. Collège de France 1982. http://1libertaire.free.fr/Foucault53.html (13 Nov. 2007). Greenblatt, Stephen. “Resonance and Wonder.” Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture. New York, London: Routledge, 1990. 161183. Gibson, Nigel. Adorno: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Habicht, Werner and Ina Schabert. Sympathielenkung in den Dramen Shakespeares:. Studien zur publikumsbezogenen Dramaturgie. Munich: Fink, 1978. Honigmann, E.A.J. Shakespeare: Seven Tragedies. The Dramatist’s Manipulation of Response. London: Macmillan, 1976. Honneth, Axel. The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1991. —: Kritik der Macht: Reflexionsstufen einer kritischen Gesellschaftstheorie. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2000. Huhn, Tom. The Cambridge Companion to Adorno. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. —: The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s “Aesthetic Theory.” Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. Jarvis, Simon. Adorno: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998. Keats, John. Selected Letters. Ed. Hyder Edward Rollins. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim: Hamburgische Dramaturgie. Hamburg: J.H. Cramer in Bremen, 1767.

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Luhmann, Niklas. Die Kunst der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1995. Roberts, David. Art and Enlightenment: Aesthetic Theory after Adorno. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. Rush, Fred. The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. Shelley, Percy, Bysshe. “A Defence of Poetry.” Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Eds. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers. New York: Norton, 1977. 478-508. Sidney, Sir Philip. “Defence of Poesie.” The Oxford Anthology of English Literature. Eds. John Hollander and Frank Kermode. London: Oxford UP, 1973. 136-149. —: Defence of Poesie: Ponsonby editon. 1995. Etext in Elizabethan spelling based on the Scolar Press facsimile of the British Museum’s copy (Shelf-mark: C.57.b.38) of the of the Defence. Ed. Richard Bear and Micah Bear. University of Oregon, 1992. http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=SidDefe.sgm &images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed &tag=public&part=all (7 Mar. 2007). Simonis, Annette. Literarischer Ästhetizismus:. Theorie der arabesken und hermetischen Kommunikation der Moderne. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000. —: “Ästhetizismus und Moderne. Genese, systematischer und wirkungsgeschichtlicher Zusammenhang.” Beiträge der Moderne-Tagung in Freiburg vom 28. Februar bis 5. März 2006. Ed. Sabina Becker. Berlin: de Gruyter 2007 (forthcoming). Sollers, Philippe. Writing and the Experience of Limits. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Spitzer, Michael. Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven’s Late Style. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2006. Thomson, Alex. Adorno: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Academi, 2006. Weber, Max. “Der Sinn der ‘Wertfreiheit’ der soziologischen und ökonomischen Wissenschaften (1917).” Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre. Tübingen: 1922. 451-502 —: “Die ‘Objektivität’ sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis.” 1914. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre. Tübingen: 1922. 146-214. Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1891. —: The Critic as Artist in Intentions. London: Methuen & Co, 1913. 93-217. —: Lady Windermere’s Fan. London: Elkin Mathews & John Lane, 1893. —: The Soul of Man under Socialism. London: Humphreys, 1912. —: Epigrams, Phrases, and Philosophies. London: UP of the Pacific, 2005. Wolf, Christa: Nachdenken über Christa T. Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1969. Zuidervaart, Lambert. Adorno’s “Aesthetic Theory”: The Redemption of Illusion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993.

BJÖRN MINX (GIESSEN)

Literature and Ethics: Social Critique and Morality in the American War II Novel For several reasons, the Second World War heralded a new era in the history of mankind. Technological and scientific progress resulted in a destructiveness never experienced before, as V1 and V2 rocket attacks on London, the firebombing of Dresden or the dropping of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima impressively demonstrated. In the Second World War, 44 % of all casualties were civilians, compared to 5 % in World War I (cf. Wiedemann 144). Add to this the holocaust and no doubt at all remains that the degree of horror of the Second World War with its 60 million casualties has no equivalent in the history of mankind. As is well known, the political landscape was changed fundamentally after the victory of the allied forces. From 1945 on, the Cold War between the newly emerging superpowers, the USA and the Soviet Union, was the dominating factor for global politics and the American self-understanding as the precursor of liberty and democracy. However, the inquisitorial witch hunts of the McCarthy era and the unsolved economic and social problems, which became manifest above all in the Civil Rights movement and the societal fragmentation during the 1960s, revealed a clear gap between this selfunderstanding and the American realities. In addition, the relative security of the pre-war era gave way to the permanent threat of the nuclear apocalypse, which had become a realistic scenario. I have recalled all these facts to the readers’ minds in order to point out the political and social background of the 1950s and 1960s American authors were embedded in. This background was the starting point of their literary treatment of the Second World War. The horrors of this particular war, in conjunction with the gap in the American self-understanding have contributed to the fact that the American war novel has become a suitable vehicle not only for the detailed depiction of war but also for social critique and protest not directly linked to warfare. Peter Jones expresses this when he says that the war novel has become “one of the most logical modes of writing about life in the twentieth century” (4) and Kalidas Misra points out that the authors of world war II novels rebelled above all against the “fruits of victory” (73). The three authors I have chosen for my discussion all fit into Jones’s and Misra’s assessments. Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, Joseph

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Heller’s Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 do not only digest personal war experiences—Mailer was an infantryman in the pacific theatre, Heller a bombardier in Italy and Vonnegut an infantryman in the Battle of the Bulge. In addition, all three writers make statements about the dominating values and norms of the time during which the novels were written. The war against the axe powers becomes secondary and is substituted by the examination of America’s values and general ethical questions. The authors thus functionalize the context of the Second World War in order to emphasize social injustices and to criticize certain institutions, traditions, character traits or moral beliefs. In the first half of this essay, I intend to explore the relationship between literature and ethics as well as why implicit strategies for the dissemination of values are preferable to explicit ones. The second half will be concerned with the nature of the values the three authors communicate in their war novels and how they do so implicitly. The philosophers Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty have made valuable observations about the strengths of literature in general and novels in particular for the implicit mediation of ethic behavior and morality. In her essay “‘Finely aware and richly responsible’: Moral Attention and the Moral Task of Literature,” Martha Nussbaum discusses the significance of literature for moral philosophy based on Henry James’ The Golden Bowl, a work she considers “a major candidate for truth” (516). In her introductory remarks concerning the difficulties of moral responsibility she observes the following: We live amid bewildering complexities. Obtuseness and refusal of vision are our besetting vices. Responsible lucidity can be wrested from that darkness only by painful vigilant effort, the intense scrutiny of particulars. (ibid.)

At another point in her essay Mrs. Nussbaum treats obtuseness and refusal of vision not only as vices but as moral failure (cf. 525). What she means with particulars are the particularities unique in each situation and each human being. In dealing with ethical behavior those particulars should be kept clearly in mind because scrutinizing them thoroughly is a possible remedy for moral failure. For her, a responsible action is extremely context-specific: “Situations are all highly concrete and they don’t present themselves with duty labels on them. Without the abilities of perception, duty is blind and therefore powerless” (ibid.). Moral attention is a fundamental characteristic that enables us to act truly responsibly in the first place because it helps us to finely adjust universal and sometimes conflicting moral principles to specific contexts. Let me illustrate this with an example. Consider these two equally important moral principles: (1) one should not kill and (2) everybody has the right to live in freedom. Imagine a person living in Nazi-Germany who adhered to both principles.

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Would it be right for this person to violate the first principle in order to maintain the second? In other words, would it be right to kill the man who was responsible for the imprisonment and murdering of countless human beings? How can one establish a hierarchy between those two—in this case––conflicting moral principles? If one of the many attempts to assassinate Hitler had been successful, the Second World War might not have lasted as long as it has or it might not have happened at all, and might have saved millions of lives. This is a classic, albeit extreme, example for the importance to perceive a particular context sensitively. Perception is the key to establish a hierarchy between conflicting moral principles. And this hierarchy has to be redefined over and over again depending on the context of the situation that is to be evaluated. This is where literature comes into play because the illustration of this context is based on one of the specific strengths of literature: on narratives. Martha Nussbaum argues that this is why authors are often fellow fighters and moral leaders in the fight against obtuseness and for the refinement of perception (cf. 527). Within the wide field of literature it is the novel which is especially suited for this struggle because novels are capable to illustrate complex situations and characters simply by telling a long story! The reader can thus examine the particulars of the fictional situations and characters. In other words, novels are a test run for moral attention and the refinement of perception. Through novels, experience can be supplemented or anticipated, and context-specific perception can be practiced. Mrs. Nussbaum expresses this with the words that “a novel offers us training in a tender and loving objectivity that we can also cultivate in life” (ibid.). In addition, because of their length, novels are especially capable to involve the reader emotionally in the fictional situations and characters. In his book Contingency, Irony and Solidarity the philosopher Richard Rorty calls this involvement “participative emotion” (Rorty 147) and Martha Nussbaum asserts that “the characters’ emotions, their stirred intelligence, their moral consciousness, become thus, by sufficiently charmed perusal, our own very adventure” (Nussbaum 527). Her colleague Richard Rorty agrees with Mrs. Nussbaum’s belief in the special aptitude of the novel for the transformation of its afore-mentioned strengths into ostensive precision and imaginative diversity. Novels help us to see “(1) the effects of social practices and institutions and (2) the effects of our private idiosyncrasies on others” (Rorty 141). The reader’s attention to literary characters can thus develop into moral attention which, ideally, inspires a critical evaluation of our own value system and moral beliefs! An example will illuminate this point: suppose a very likable character is featured in a novel and is able to gain our benevolence. Yet this gener-

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ally likeable character is relativized by some characteristic—say he has an obsession with orderliness and constantly nags other characters to become as orderly as he is, thereby bedeviling their lives. As soon as there are persons with such an obsession among the readers, the possibility exists that those readers start questioning their own conduct. Why is this so? Because the combination of the two specific strengths of novels—(1) the ability to illustrate complex situations and (2) the ability to involve the reader emotionally—lead within him to moral attention and to an awareness for the consequences of such an obsession for orderliness. Everything that has been said up to now points to the fact that storytelling is in itself a very elegant and helpful strategy to disseminate critique and values indirectly and implicitly instead of preaching them explicitly. Please consider my last example: an author does not need to address explicitly the problem of someone trying to impose orderliness on somebody else. What he could do instead is simply tell his story, illustrate the background of his characters and involve the reader emotionally—in other words, he could show his critique implicitly instead of preaching it explicitly. But what exactly makes implicit critique so interesting and important? It has to do with its effectiveness. Consider once more the example of someone obsessed with orderliness and imagine someone trying to convince this person of the wrongness of his behavior explicitly. Explicit critique often tends to preach ethical behavior. Yet preaching would be moralizing. The moralizer surely is right in assuming that the attempt to impose orderliness on someone else is worthy of critique. And yet, it is a mechanism we probably all know: as soon as someone tries to preach us ethical behavior, as soon as someone moralizes, it is much easier for us to resist the critique. Explicit critique both in real life and in novels is less likely to provoke ethical behavior than indirect critique. Why? The reason is that—in the case of novels—the reader’s own personal opinions and behavioral patterns are much more difficult to defend against narratives, because these narratives, with their complex and subtle illustration of potential consequences of the reader’s opinions and behavioral patterns generate participative emotion. So narratives are much more disarming than is moralizing. Showing consequences is more effective than talking about them. As narratives provide us with the understanding of certain situations and characters, i.e., with a prerequisite for empathy—they (the narratives) are a very effective medium to guide the reader to a certain insight. Before I proceed to present the strategies involved in the implicit dissemination of values from the three war novels, I’d like to point out why I have chosen The Naked and the Dead, Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse 5 for my

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analysis. If authors can influence individual value systems of their readers, it would appear that especially popular and best-selling novels have the potential to influence so many individual value systems that even the collective value system of a society might be affected. As Astrid Erll has shown in her doctoral thesis Gedächtnisromane (“Memory-making novels”), literary works affect the collective memory and—provided they are received on a massive scale—can contribute to the development of ideas of the past or to the mediation of historical memory (cf. 3). Additionally, as I have outlined before, novels can be a test run for moral attention. So to a certain degree, popular novels may be capable not only of influencing the collective memory of a society but also its collective conception of morality. Mailer’s, Heller’s and Vonnegut’s novels are without exception extremely popular, best-selling and broadly received novels. Up to 1981 alone, The Naked and the Dead was published in 23 editions and sold some 3.25 million copies (cf. Mills 90, 100-102). And Charlie Reilly asserts that Catch-22 “with more than ten million copies sold remains one of modern literature’s most admired novels” (507). Public figures like Cassius Clay have quoted the novel so often that its title is widely known in America and has even become part of the everyday language use. Lastly, the publication of Slaughterhouse 5 in 1969 was a literary event which made its author a nationally known figure that enjoyed, just like Joseph Heller, the status of a guru for the anti-Vietnam movement. All three books were so successful that they were adapted for the screen. This is what makes those novels such interesting objects of scrutiny. By means of their popularity they can exert much more influence on collective moral beliefs than less admired works. Let’s return to the implicit strategies for the dissemination of values: in what ways can novelists implicitly voice social critique? In order to ensure the mediation of what authors believe is right or wrong they have to direct the reception of their readers. One of the most effective methods to do so is to direct the reader’s sympathy, i.e., his affective and/or cognitive reactions. Pity, interest, fascination, admiration, respect, identification or the comprehension of a behavior which we would otherwise repudiate are just some of these possible affective and cognitive reactions that recipients can experience (cf. Clemen 13). They can be consciously anticipated by the author and used for his aims. I will continue with a presentation of the several strategies that the three authors employed to control these reactions. For reasons of space I should concentrate on what I believe to be the main points of critique and the most important strategies used to voice this critique implicitly.

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1. Norman Mailer The Naked and the Dead, published in 1948, is the fictitious account of an American military campaign in the Pacific theatre during the Second World War. A division of American troops, under the command of General Edward Cummings, conquers the island of Anopopei, occupied by the Japanese. In its realistic-naturalistic style the novel is not only a detailed study of the hardships of war but also of the American society of the 1930s and 1940s. The heterogeneity of the social, religious, geographical and economic backgrounds of its characters—a representative crossrange of the American population—suggests that in the novel, the army is used as a symbol for the American society. Mailer once said about his novel that he “tried to explore the outrageous proportions of cause and effect, of effort and recompense in a sick society” (qtd. in Kaufmann 1). In order to explore these proportions the author establishes contrasts and analogies between characters and situations. He creates them through the conception of the plot, the character conception, the depiction of the character’s consciousness and his “Time Machine” flashbacks which he uses to illuminate the socio-economic background of the protagonists. Mailer’s temporary fascination with Marxism forms the background of his first point of critique, directed at America’s elite society which he blames to be working towards the consolidation of a class system which holds the working mass captive in its socio-economic background and thus in poor circumstances. He makes this clear by highlighting the relationship between origin and societal status of his characters. There is a clear parallelism between status in the army and status in the pre-war society of every single one of his characters. Mailer makes a clear distinction between the enlisted men and the officers. Without exception, all the officers were born into bourgeois, influential and financially privileged families, and they all went to college. In the Army they enjoy a disproportionate number of privileges. So both in civil life and in the Army they form the elite of the society. Most of the enlisted men, however, have endured severe hardships during the 1930s. For Private Red Valsen life in the army is both physically and emotionally as hard as it was during his teenage working years in a Montana mine. In civil life and in the army, Sergeant Julio Martinez suffers from an inferiority complex nurtured by racist remarks, poverty and disrespectful behavior. Private Joey Goldstein comes from a poor Jewish family and is the hardest working man of all of Mailer’s characters. And yet his discipline neither gets him far in civil life nor in the military. He has always been a bullied outsider who suffers from anti-Semitic discrimination. So there is a pattern: Neither in civil life nor in the Army can any of the enlisted men shape their own lives. They

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are not master of their situations, let alone their lives. Their world has always been detached from that of the officers and it continues to be so in the Army. Mailer highlights this detachment mainly through changes in the setting and the use of his narrator, who has insight into the consciousness of all characters and renders their feelings without any evaluative comment in their own linguistic register. Mailer thereby creates a striking contrast between the blue-collar atmosphere of the campaign headquarter, marked by condescension for the enlisted men, and the agony and anguish these latter experience in their daily fight with the jungle and the Japanese soldiers. Thus, by establishing contrasts and analogies and by using the Army symbolically as a microcosm of the American society, Mailer invites the reader to retranslate these contrasts and analogies into a socio-critical message. The message is this: one’s socioeconomic background determines intellectual possibilities and material success in life. Mailer thus exposes America as a place of social privilege and as land of limited possibilities which stands in sharp contrast to the values it claims to represent, i.e., equality and self-determination. As long as this doctrine of birth right determines the societal structure Mailer’s “outrageous proportions of cause and effect, of effort and recompense” (Kaufman 1) will always exist. The second point of critique is concerned with the diminishing influence of the individual on one’s own life. This subject matter is elaborated in the antagonisms between the division commander General Cummings and his aid Lieutenant Robert Hearn; and between platoon leader Sergeant Sam Croft and Private Red Valsen. Cummings, the proto-fascist representative of a reactionary system based on hierarchical wielding of power who keeps talking about fear ladders and contempt for subordinates, and the ruthless, war-loving and sadistic Croft are the “villains” of the novel. Both are characterized by an extremely strong will and by courageous and dynamic behavior. They bully and humiliate their antagonists Hearn, a liberal and an advocate for personal integrity and the freedom of the individual, and the humorous, witty and popular Valsen, whose attempt to keep his personal freedom can be summarized by his motto “I won’t take no crap from nobody” (The Naked and the Dead 29). So Mailer seemingly establishes Hearn and Valsen as moral center of the novel, thereby directing the reader’s benevolence towards them and offering him the opportunity to identify with them. He only does so seemingly because Mailer puts both Hearn and Valsen into perspective by characterizing them in a way that from the author’s point of view makes them unworthy of the reader’s benevolence. He exposes Hearn’s liberal talk as pure lip service by establishing clear parallels between him and Cummings, who above all share a clearly detectable lust for power. In addition, the liberal Hearn

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accepts in advance the imminent post-war political defeat of the American left against the reactionary forces, represented by Cummings. He and Valsen lack the determination to really “take no crap from nobody.” They both turn out to be individualists who are short of solidarity with their comrades and avoid personal relationships, thereby ignoring the interdependence of the men in their antagonism with Cummings and Croft. So Mailer has Hearn killed and arranges for Valsen’s complete humiliation at the hands of Croft. In doing so, the author implicitly communicates a number of important messages: (1) His apprehension that the reactionary forces seize power in post-war America in order to expand the authoritarian military structure to the civil society. (2) By outfitting Hearn with liberal values but no vision of how to transform those values into action, Mailer suggests that for him the concept of liberalism is no longer a political alternative. Liberalism seems to lack the vision necessary to effectively thwart the imminent societal reorganization by the reactionaries. (3) Mailer implicitly suggests that both Hearn’s and Red’s rebellions lack the determination and commitment for fellow human beings which are necessary to fight the forces that constrain the freedom of the individual. Their attitudes towards life are therefore not suitable for the challenges of the post-war era. (4) Without ever explicitly stating it, the author communicates a value hierarchy: he rates Cummings’s and Croft’s vigor, courage, resolution, thoroughgoingness and vitality higher than Hearn’s and Red’s virtuous but dispirited and passive attitude. And he does so because Cummings and Croft are much better in responding to life actively. In the deterministic society Mailer portrays, those are the criteria for real heroism. This is the message for those readers who can detect themselves in the weaknesses of Hearn and Red! One could say that the wrong protagonists have been outfitted with the right character traits. Based on this, Mailer’s ideal hero would be someone that merges Hearn’s and Red’s liberal attitudes with Cummings’ and Croft’s vigorous implementation, creating something Diana Trilling has called “conscious barbarism” (Trilling 46). 2. Joseph Heller Catch-22, published in 1961, is Joseph Heller’s satirical response to the American social order, the increasing institutionalization of life and the prevailing value system of the 1950s. The fictional world is marked by absurdity, irrationality and insanity. The soldiers of an American Air Force unit in the Mediterranean Sea are endangered not only by the German anti-aircraft gunners, but even more by the destructive logic of their supe-

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riors who only think of their own well-being, not hesitating to risk their soldiers’ lives for completely senseless endeavors such as getting neat aerial photographs of exploding bombs. They can legitimize their behavior by referring to the regulation Catch-22 which basically says that the military establishment has a right to do anything it can’t be stopped from doing. As in The Naked and the Dead, the implicit strategies involved in the dissemination of values include the character conception as well as the conception of the plot. Combined, they generate a contrast between the protagonist and bombardier John Yossarian, and all of his superiors and most of his fellow soldiers. This contrast points towards a morally special status of Yossarian, thus offering the reader the possibility to sympathize with him. He is the most likeable character because he is the only one who realizes the destructive nature of war and the outrageous suffering, injustice and absurdity around him. And he is the only one who rebels against his superiors when they constantly raise the number of missions each soldier has to fly. With the death of Nately, Yossarian has lost the last of his friends. He now resolves to desert the Army in order to repudiate the regulation Catch-22 and to flee the recklessly profit-seeking mess officer Milo Minderbinder and the military, both of which senselessly endanger his life for their own benefit. In having Yossarian desert, Joseph Heller dismisses heroic self-sacrifice as a dangerous delusion because at the worst it leads to the loss of one’s own life for questionable motifs and interests. Yet Heller incorporates several new implicit strategies to direct his reader’s affective reactions. Humor plays a major role for those strategies. He creates comic and absurd situations in order to expose the alarming inhumanities which pollute our political, social, and economic systems (also cf. Seltzer 74-92). One such example is Captain Black’s Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade, a hilarious satire on the institutionalized values that enabled the excesses of the McCarthy witch hunt, the anti-communistic hysteria and the fanatic insisting on patriotic loyalty during the 1950s in America. According to the doctrine of continual reaffirmation each soldier has to sign several loyalty forms in order to prove his allegiance to America. The crusade is directed against Major Major who accidentally got promoted to the position Black wanted himself. Heller exploits this comic episode in such a way that he has Black expose himself as a self-righteous hypocrite who makes no secret of the purpose of his crusade “to make everyone we don’t like afraid and to alert people to the danger of Major Major” (Catch-22 152). When Doc Daneeka asks Black what made him so sure Major Major was a Communist, Black answers:

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‘You never heard him denying it until we began accusing him, did you? And you don’t see him signing any of our loyalty oaths.’ ‘You aren’t letting him sign any.’ ‘Of course not. […] That would defeat the whole purpose of our crusade.’ (150)

So Heller implicitly exposes the dictum “might makes right” as dangerous. Just as in the 1950s, in Catch-22 vague suspicions and personal antipathy are sufficient for accusations; refusals to participate in the crusade are interpreted as a confession of guilt. Heller has got another innovative implicit strategy: it is the novel’s very form. The most striking feature of Catch-22 is its time structure. The novel lacks a traditional linear chronology and the narrator jumps from person to person, not from event to event. A very significant consequence of this time structure is the loss of a clear causal succession of events. In doing so, Heller creates within the reader the same disorientation that Yossarian is experiencing throughout the novel. This disorientation is even amplified by a very unique way to distribute information about events and characters. Some of the more significant events are narrated several times, each time adding new information. James Mellard has called this technique “delayed revelation” (Mellard 515). And additionally, through the time structure the reader gets the impression that all events are happening almost at the same time even though some of them happened months before the novel begins. This effect of simultaneity enables the reader to directly live through these events together with Yossarian instead of simply learning about them from the narrator. The time structure and the technique of delayed revelation therefore contribute to the possibility to sympathize with the likeable Yossarian and to understand the context that lead to his desertion. I will give you one last example from the novel which combines the two implicit strategies I have just presented. There is a character named Mudd, but generally referred to as the “dead man in Yossarian’s tent.” Initially, the reader doesn’t know what happened to Mudd. All we know is that Yossarian is not allowed to remove Mudd’s personal belongings from his tent because the man had not officially reported to duty before he was killed in action. For the military administration he therefore cannot be dead. This of course is a satiric attack on administrative bureaucracy intended to cause laughter. Because the tone of the first two thirds of the novel is characterized by extremely biting and hilarious satire, and because Mudd’s demise is always referred to casually, the Mudd-episode is extremely funny. Later on we learn that Mudd was killed only two hours after he arrived in Yossarian’s unit. Here, the humorous tone already starts to offer its tragic implications. When the reader at last finds out that Mudd was killed during the mission over Orvieto, our laughter turns into shocked disbelief and horror. The episode progresses into black humor

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which Ellen Fitzgerald has defined as a blend of slapstick and shock (cf. Fitzgerald 117). For during the mission over Orvieto, the mess officer Milo Minderbinder, founder of an international black market consortium, has collaborated with the Germans in order to make a profit: he gets 1000 dollars for each American plane shot down and in exchange he gave away the mission details: The arrangements were fair to both sides. Since Milo did have freedom of passage everywhere, his planes were able to steal over in a sneak attack without alerting the German anti-aircraft gunners; and since Milo knew about the attack, he was able to alert German antiaircraft gunners in sufficient time for them to begin firing accurately the moment the planes came into range. It was an ideal arrangement for everyone but the dead man in Yossarian’s tent, who was killed over the target the day he arrived. (Catch-22 324)

This information about the details of Mudd’s absurd death also changes the picture we have had about Milo up to this point. For up to here, Heller has provided us only with information which creates the impression that Milo is quite an upright man who only tries to be an efficient mess officer. Milo’s behavior, such as his irrational buying policy is hilarious, may be a bit bizarre but not threatening or criminal. And even the moral center Yossarian treats him with “laughing amazement and admiration” (Catch-22 296). So Heller has tricked the reader into laughing about Milo rather than being outraged by him. Heller has talked about this effect in an interview: “I tried consciously for a comic effect juxtaposed with the catastrophic. I wanted people to laugh and then to look back with horror at what they were laughing at” (in Merrill 47). I have now outlined the strategies involved in the dissemination of values in Catch-22. But what exactly is the nature of these values? First of all, Joseph Heller establishes a connection between the fictitious world of Catch-22 and the real world. Anachronisms like IBM computers, helicopters or farming subsidies suggest that the author has designed the novel as satirical counterpart of the real 1950s. He deplores that the new militaryindustrial power elite has gained such an influence that blind patriotic loyalty and profit-seeking have become more important than individual freedom and the right to live in dignity, against the loss of which he cautions us. According to the author, patriotism and profit-seeking are particularly questionable when they are used to enforce dubious goals or when they serve only the interests of those who demand it. Heller identifies such characteristics as boundless greed and ambition, power-seeking, hypocrisy, self-righteousness, opportunism, irresponsibility and unscrupulousness as causes for the disrespectful treatment of human dignity and human life. In doing so he tries to sensitize his readers for the downsides of those characteristics.

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3. Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse 5, published in 1969, is a novel that tries to digest the firebombing of Dresden which Vonnegut has seen as a prisoner of war and which killed thousands of civilians. Like Mailer, Vonnegut initially creates his protagonist Billy Pilgrim as a likeable and sympathetic character but proceeds to put the reader’s sympathy with Billy into perspective by outfitting him with a morally questionable attitude towards life. Again, as in Mailer’s and Heller’s novels, the course of plot and the character conception are very important implicit strategies to do so. Billy is portrayed as someone who deserves our unconfined pity: he is unenthusiastic about life and has had a nasty father who caused him several traumas. In war, with his incomplete military equipment, he is so misplaced that he becomes the target of mockery of his fellow soldiers. Most importantly, the firebombing of Dresden he survived in a slaughterhouse has had such a deep impact on him that he cannot come to terms with life but by fleeing into schizophrenia, inventing the extraterrestrial and time-traveling Tralfamadorians. Yet this schizophrenia is also the reason for Billy’s attitude to life for the Tralfamadorian philosophy teaches him the quiet acceptance of all things happening. As a consequence, Billy has resigned to a complete and phlegmatic indifference believing that each moment in time is predetermined and that trying to explain and change things is foolish. Those who die are meant to die. This belief in predetermination denies the existence of guilt, responsibility and the concept of free will. He accepts everything that happens around him with stoic equanimity, including the social turmoil and the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and above all, the Vietnam War, to which he has got no objections. It is exactly this indifferent attitude that Vonnegut attacks and that he was attacked for by many critics who equated Billy’s attitude with that of the author.1 There are indeed clear parallels in the biographies of Vonnegut and Pilgrim that initially support such an equation, for instance their same age, their survival of the Dresden bombing and their immediate marriage after the war, all of which becomes clear in the autobiographical first chapter. However, Vonnegut gives many hints that equating him with Billy is a serious mistake. He distances himself frequently from Billy Pilgrim and he does so implicitly, thereby not only repudiating Billy but also his fatal indifference. The strategies involved are quite subtle, demanding very active reading by the recipients. The most important ones are all connected to Vonnegut’s style and technique, his unique blending of autobiography and _____________ 1

Cf. for instance Chabot 45-51; Harris 69; Kazin 88; or Tanner 200.

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science fiction. This blending is the result of an impossibility to narrate— Vonnegut had tried to find a literary form appropriate to the horrors he himself had witnessed in Dresden for 23 years. The novel has a subtitle: “This is a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from peace.” This subtitle already hints at the enormous influence the Tralfamadorian literary theory seems to have exerted on Slaughterhouse 5’s literary technique. It goes like this: Each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message—describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfalmadorians read them all at once, not one after another. There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. (Slaughterhouse 5 64)

Vonnegut imitates this literary style, thereby seemingly suggesting that the Tralfamadorian and Billy’s philosophy have role model character for him. The novel has no linear chronology because the narrator follows Billy’s time traveling. Thus, there is no traditional structure with a beginning, a middle part and an end. This makes it difficult for the reader to establish a causal sequence of the events. And there is indeed no suspense as Vonnegut gives away the climax of the novel in the first chapter. In addition, the novel really consists of those “clumps of symbols separated by stars” which are characteristic for the Tralfamadorian literature: the paragraphs in Slaughterhouse 5 are short and their order suggests no immediate relation to each other. Vonnegut proceeds to expose this literary theory implicitly as inappropriate for us Earthlings, thereby also repudiating Billy’s philosophical world. The first thing is that, unlike the Tralfamadorian clumps of symbols, Vonnegut’s paragraphs do have a connection, established mainly through the use of repetitions. The motif of the “Three Musqueteers” is one such example. Vonnegut associates three characters with a Three Musqueteers chocolate bar. Roland Weary, a war loving young soldier with heroic dreams; Valencia Pilgrim, Billy’s wife who is proud that Billy was a soldier; and a former colleague of Vonnegut, who voyeuristically asked the author what he had witnessed in war. All three become the target of Vonnegut’s satire because they all glorify war romantically and feel the need to identify with war heroes. Yet for Vonnegut war is not heroic but destructively foolish. He does not want to give the reader the slightest opportunity to identify with seemingly heroic behavior which is why the cowardly, weak and passive Billy is the epitome of the anti-hero. In addition, it becomes clear that Earthlings cannot see all the clumps of symbols at once, like the Tralfamadorians do. We cannot ignore the

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sequentiality of our reading process and become aware that on Earth, a linear chronology and causality are real. Vonnegut himself makes this clear in the autobiographical first chapter during a sleepless night where he wishes time would go by faster. Yet he cannot deny that “[a]s an Earthling, I had to believe whatever clocks said––and calendars” (Slaughterhouse 5 15). So the Tralfamadorian philosophy which states that there are no morals, no causes, no effects on Earth, is unhinged. Temporality is NOT an illusion, and neither are causality and therefore the need for a sense of responsibility! So Billy’s passivity is implicitly exposed not as a consoling way of life but as an irresponsible delusion. There are two more elements of Vonnegut’s literary technique involved in the implicit dissemination of values: the blending of fact and fiction and his excessive use of intertextual references. Vonnegut incorporates quotes and text passages from history books, documentaries, epitaphs, post cards, fictional works, speeches or the Bible. He refers to them often and thereby makes it implicitly clear that the author attacks the original statements. For example, in the first chapter Vonnegut refers to the biblical destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and to how God commanded all inhabitants not to look back. He writes: “But Lot’s wife did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human” (Slaughterhouse 5 16). God punished her and turned her into a pillar of salt, and later on, Vonnegut asserts that his book was written by a “pillar of salt” (ibid.), implicitly suggesting that looking back is desirable even though the Tralfamadorians counsel Billy not to return to the unpleasant events of his life. The author does look back at Dresden to find out how the repetition of such events can be avoided. He upholds his traumatic memory and passes it on to millions of readers. By referring to several other religious texts, Vonnegut can implicitly dismiss the concept of religion as a justification of war by means of divine will; and divine will denies just like the Tralfamadorian philosophy the possibility to shape reality actively and absolves every wrongdoer from guilt. The blending of fact and fiction is the last major strategy to distance the author from Billy. There are four passages in which Vonnegut, the author, hints explicitly at his presence in the text, thereby destroying the aesthetic illusion and making implicitly clear that he and Billy cannot be the same person, and that their world views are not the same. Vonnegut’s world view is disseminated via another intertextual device, namely the prayer “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference” (44). This prayer is located in Billy’s workroom and it is commented on with the ironic statement: “Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.” This ironic side blow is

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Vonnegut’s central concern: As deplorable as Dresden is, it is the past and therefore cannot be changed. However, in 1969, Vietnam was the present and therefore still changeable! Vonnegut criticizes Billy’s phlegmatic attitude and suggests thereby that there ARE indeed aspects of contemporary life that can be changed—if we are courageous. All the atrocities and injustices that humans do to others are neither predetermined nor divine will. They are alterable! He exposes man-made concepts like religion, race and nation in combination with ignorance, patriotism or heroism as the driving force behind every war, poverty and prejudice in the history of mankind. The prayer implicitly challenges man to change his situation himself instead of relying on God or instead of remaining in deterministic apathy. He suggests a way to change things: by means of charity and solidarity. Robert Scholes has summarized Vonnegut’s moral message with the words: “Be kind. Don’t hurt. Death is coming for all of us anyway…” (38), and William Rodney Allen adds the formulation that Slaughterhouse 5 teaches partly a “Let it be,” yet much more often a “Let it be different” (96). To sum up, it should be mentioned that the criticism voiced in the three novels is geared by the particular circumstances prevailing during the time the novels were written in. With increasing distance to the end of the war one can notice an expansion of the subject matter and thereby of the criticism, which becomes more universal. Mailer reacted to the immediate outcome of World War II for America’s society, Heller attacked the values of the 1950s and Vonnegut explored the general attitudes that lead to war, poverty and prejudice. It is not only the novel’s content, however, that changes with increasing distance to the end of the war. The literary techniques involved in the implicit dissemination of values also change: they become more unusual and experimental. All three authors direct their readers implicitly by inviting them to retranslate contrasts and analogies. These are created mainly through the character conception and the conception of the plot. With his naturalistic technique Mailer chose a very conventional writing style. This style is surely the most adequate way to communicate the prime characteristics of war: the everyday life of the soldiers, physical and psychic exhaustion, fear, trauma, combat operations, injury and death. Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse 5 also cover these basic features of war but Heller and Vonnegut judged traditional writing styles as inept to adequately highlight the impersonal absurdity, irrationality and grotesqueness of the Second World War and the post-war era. Both authors employed new and experimental literary techniques that “dramatize their view of the human condition rather than merely describe it,” as Jean Kennard put it (526, my italics). And lastly, the tone of the narratives has changed. Mailer’s serious, documentary tone, Heller’s excessive use of irony, satire and black humor and

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Vonnegut’s seemingly indifferent style of narration are all different answers to the increasing irrationality of the particular time during which the novel was written. While all three authors have a very similar moral conclusion, i.e., the call to assume responsibility for one’s actions, there still is a clear movement in the value hierarchy between 1948 and 1969. With his fascination for the rather heroic traits of Croft, Mailer implies he judges virile courage and heroism as necessary to assume moral responsibility. For Heller, however, it is not important whether acting morally contains cowardice and lack of heroism. And Kurt Vonnegut even rejects heroism! So courage and heroism are no longer considered virtues because they can kill you. Sheer survival has become the new embodiment of courage and heroism (cf. also Gross 87 and Misra 73-75) because the true enemy was not to be found in communism or Vietnam but within the US in the advocates of questionable wars who propagated “quiet courage, unquestioning loyalty and noble conquest” (Misra 78) as behavior worthy of imitation. Kurt Vonnegut once said he tried to poison his readers’ minds with humanity (cf. Scholes 107). This is true for all three novels, whose authors are indeed fellow fighters in the fight against moral obtuseness and for the refinement of perception.

References Allen, William Rodney. Understanding Kurt Vonnegut. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1991. Chabot, C. Barry. “Slaughterhouse-Five and the Comforts of Indifference.” Essays in Literature 8.1 (1981): 45-51. Clemen, Wolfgang. “Überlegungen zur Untersuchbarkeit von Sympathielenkung in Shakespeares Dramen.” Sympathielenkung in den Dramen Shakespeares. Eds. Werner Habicht and Ina Schabert. Munich: Fink, 1978. 11-19. Erll, Astrid. Gedächtnisromane: Literatur über den Ersten Weltkrieg als Medium englischer und deutscher Erinnerungskulturen in den 1920er Jahren. Trier: WVT, 2003. Fitzgerald, Sister Ellen. World War II in the American Novel: Hawkes, Heller, Kosinski, and Vonnegut. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1976. Gross, Beverly. “‘Insaninty Is Contagious’: The Mad World of Catch-22.” The Centennial Review 26.1 (1982): 86-113. Harris, Charles B. Contemporary American Novelists of the Absurd. New Haven: College & University P, 1971. Heller, Joseph. Catch-22. London: Vintage, 1994 [1961].

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Jones, Peter G. War and the Novelist: Appraising the American War Novel. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1976. Kaufmann, Donald L. Norman Mailer: The Countdown: The First Twenty Years. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1969. Kazin, Alfred. The Bright Book of Life. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1973. Kennard, Jean. “Joseph Heller: At War with Absurdity.” Joseph Heller’s ‘Catch-22’: A Critical Edition. Ed. Robert M. Scotto. New York: Delta, 1973. 526-540. Mailer, Norman. The Naked and the Dead. New York: New American Library, 1954 [1948]. Mellard, James M. “Catch-22: ‘Déjà vu’ and the Labyrinth of Memory.” Joseph Heller’s ‘Catch-22’: A Critical Edition. Robert M. Scotto. New York: Delta, 1973. 512-525. Mills, Hilary. Mailer: A Biography. New York: Empire Books, 1982. Misra, Kalidas. “The American War Novel from World War II to Vietnam.” Indian Journal of American Studies 14.2 (1984): 73-80. Nussbaum, Martha. “‘Finely Aware and Richly Responsible’: Moral Attention and the Moral Task of Literature.” The Journal of Philosophy 82.10 (1985): 516-529. Reilly, Charlie. “An Interview with Joseph Heller.” Contemporary Literature 39.4 (1998): 507-522. Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Scholes, Robert. “A Talk with Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.” The Vonnegut Statement. Eds. Jerome Klinkowitz, and John Somer. New York: Delta, 1973. 90-118. Seltzer, Leon F. “Milo’s ‘Culpable Innocence’: Absurdity as Moral Insanity in Catch-22.” Critical Essays on Joseph Heller. Ed. James Nagel. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1984. 74-92. Tanner, Tony. City of Words. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Trilling, Diana. “The Radical Moralism of Norman Mailer.” Norman Mailer: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Leo Braudy. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1972. 42-65. Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse 5 or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death. London: Vintage, 2003 [1969]. Wiedemann, Barbara. “American War Novels.” War and Peace: Perspectives in the Nuclear Age. Eds. Ulrich Goebel and Otto Nelson. Lubbock: Texas Tech UP, 1988. 137-144.

SUSANA ONEGA (ZARAGOZA)

The Nightmare of History, the Value of Art and the Ethics of Love in Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters1 In a recently published book entitled Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of Graham Swift, Stef Craps points out how Linda Hutcheon’s adscription of Waterland to the category of “historiographic metafiction” in her immensely influential book A Poetics of Postmodernism, largely determined the shape and form of academic criticism on Swift’s work in general and on Waterland in particular. Inspired by Hutcheon’s epistemological approach to postmodernism, a great number of critics were “predominantly concerned with the materiality of the literary artifact and tended to underplay its ethical dimension” (Craps 14). This description of Swift criticism might equally be applied to criticism on Julian Barnes, since his best-known novels, Flaubert’s Parrot and A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, are usually approached as paradigmatic examples of British historiographic metafiction. Craps’ reassessment of Swift’s novels from the perspective of trauma studies allows her to cast interesting new light on them. She demonstrates that the novels are “haunted by bereavements, both real and symbolic” and that they invariably develop around recurrent “experiences of overwhelming loss that the characters […] are struggling to come to terms with” (1). As Craps explains, “[t]he prototypical Swiftian protagonist is a humble, unheroic, vulnerable older man who finds himself in a state of acute crisis” brought about by “the insidious hold exerted over the present by a traumatic past.” For this traumatized narrator-character “story-telling is an existential necessity,” since it is through negation of the traumatic facts of the past and the imaginative invention of “an illusory idea of wholeness” that he invariably attempts to “put the past to rest” (2). As early as 1991, David Leon Higdon, in a book chapter entitled “‘Unconfessed Confessions’: The Narrators of Graham Swift and Julian Barnes,” highlighted the two authors’ “shared thematic and structural interests,” including the “creation of a new type of narrator, the reluctant _____________ 1

The research carried out for the writing of this paper has been financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology (MCYT) and the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER), project no. HUM200400344/FIL.

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narrator, who is reliable in strict terms, […] but who has seen, experienced or caused something so traumatic that he must approach the telling of it through indirections, masks and substitutions” (174). According to Higdon, then, trauma also lies at the heart of Julian Barnes’s narratorcharacters, providing them with a psychological motivation for their compulsion to negate the unbearable facts of the past and to invent compensatory narratives of wholeness. As Higdon notes, the psychological struggle underlying these traumatized narrators’ compulsive story-telling is often expressed in the need to force “the boundaries of fiction into yet new shapes” (ibid.), thus evincing the inadequacy of traditional narrative forms to convey their meaning. Higdon’s suggestion that Julian Barnes’s novels are healing fictions narrated by traumatized narrator-characters who must fight their medium and their own negativity in order to come to terms with self and world contrasts with the standard critical definition of A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters as a witty and playful historiographic metafiction, inspired by an extreme form of postmodernist relativism. This is the view held, for example, by Joyce Carol Oates in a review of the novel, where she describes it as “a playful, witty and entertaining gathering of conjectures by a man to whom ideas are quite crucial” (13). Similarly, in the entry on Julian Barnes in The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English it is stated that A History of the World shows “the writer at his most playful and experimental in his treatment of a number of related themes: the nature of art, religion, love, and death” (Stringer 46). In contrast to Higdon, who links formal experimentation with the inadequacy of traditional literary forms to negotiate trauma, in these descriptions of A History of the World the implicit assumption is that the novel’s experimentalism makes it unsuitable to broach ethical questions. As Christina Kotte, following Ansgar Nünning, has pointed out, “the interaction of ethics and postmodern historical fiction has so far been explored almost exclusively from the angle of revisionist historical fiction,” that is, fictions “fuelled by the desire to re-write “official” history from the perspective of its victims” (57– 8). The aim of Kotte’s book, Ethical Dimensions in British Historiographic Metafiction, is precisely to dismantle “the rigid opposition between revisionist historical fiction as an ethically valid form of postmodern historical fiction on the one hand, and historiographic metafiction as ethically myopic on the other” and to demonstrate “that ethics can indeed subsist in a novel other than in relation to the ‘world’ depicted, i.e., a world largely determined as single and unitary rather than as refracted and shifting” (60). Kotte’s agenda is relevant and necessary. However, her aim to prove that ethics can “subsist” in historiographic metafiction—rather than attempt to demonstrate that ethics is a major issue in this type of postmod-

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ernist novels—betrays the same humanist bias against experimentalism she wishes theoretically to dismantle. What is more, the starting point for her analysis is the assumption that historiographic metafictions are different from revisionist novels in that they are not fuelled by the attempt “to re-write ‘official’ history from the perspective of its victims,” an assumption that would be debatable in the light of novels such as Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion and Sexing the Cherry, Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, or indeed, Julian Barnes’s A History of the World. It is difficult to imagine a more marginalized and victimized character than the narrator of the first chapter, “The Stowaway”: a microscopic woodworm belonging to a species branded as “unclean” and condemned to extinction by Noah. After analyzing the fragmentary structure of A History of the World and detecting on closer examination “a complex net of motifs and allusions that constantly recur in the narrative” (Kotte 77), Kotte concludes that the novel lacks a unifying pattern of meaning: In fact, Barnes’ narrative might be said to parody conventional historiographic strategies by installing numerous leitmotifs and repetitions, thereby nourishing the reader’s expectations of some deep structure in history, whilst simultaneously refusing to invest these echoes with a ‘weighty’ meaning. The panoply of bizarre connections, which refuse to add up to an integrated whole […] seem to mock all efforts at detecting an underlying order in history. (79)

Kotte’s assertion that the novel’s numerous leitmotifs and repetitions are random and parodic and therefore lack “‘weighty’ meaning” echo Salman Rushdie’s remark that “for me the bits of A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters didn’t quite add up […] although they possess in abundance the high literary virtue of lightness, they fail to acquire, by cumulation, the necessary weight” (243).2 Unable, like Rushdie, to find a “weighty” reason for the novel’s fragmentariness beyond mere postmodernist playfulness, Kotte concludes that the novel “positively celebrates heterogeneity and pluralism” (79). In the brief “Author Statement” that appears in the British Council web page devoted to Julian Barnes, the writer implicitly refutes this view of his novel when he says that “[w]riters should have the highest ambition: _____________ 2

Kotte and Rushdie’s view of the novel is representative of the novel’s reception by a significant number of reviewers and critics. As Vanessa Guignery points out in her detailed overview of the novel’s reception, the publication of the novel rekindled the debate initiated by the publication of Flaubert’s Parrot, summarised by David Sexton’s remark that: “Barnes writes books which look like novels and get shelved as novels but which, when you open them up, are something else altogether.” As Guignery further explains, “[s]ome critics, daunted by the lack of a single plot, the disruption of chronology and the absence of narrative cohesion, referred to the book as a collection of tales, stories or short stories” (The Fiction 61).

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not just for themselves, but for the form they work in,” and that he is a writer for one major reason: because I believe that the best art tells the most truth about life. Listen to the competing lies: to the tatty rhetoric of politics, the false promises of religion, the contaminated voices of television and journalism. Whereas the novel tells the beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truth. This is its paradox, its grandeur, its seductive dangerousness. (n. pag.)

Barnes, then, like Graham Swift, Peter Ackroyd, Charles Palliser, Jeanette Winterson and other British writers of historiographic metafiction, has an Aristotelian conception of art and believes in its truth-telling value, just as he believes in the seriousness and importance of the writer’s work. Consequently, the fragmentariness and plurivocity of A History of the World can neither simply stem from Barnes’s playful adherence to extreme relativism nor from a resigned endorsement of the “anything goes” policy ascribed by humanist critics to postmodernist experimentalism. Rather, as the author suggests in the above quotation, the novel’s form is dictated by his serious need to confront the “competing lies” of history, politics, religion and the mass media with the beautiful and truth-telling lies of art. In keeping with the self-reflexivity of historiographic metafiction, Barnes offers the reader a detailed exposition of his ideas on these issues in the half chapter, “Parenthesis,” which, as Lionel Kelly has pointed out, is “a parergon, a discourse outside the main frame by the writer Barnes, in his own person, with reflections on love, perhaps modeled on Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse” (2).3 Significantly, the half chapter begins with Barnes’s persona in bed, plagued by insomnia, while his wife sleeps peacefully by his side. As he explains, their nights are different: Every so often I find myself catapulted out of bed with fear of time and death, panic at the approaching void; feet on the floor, head in hands, I shout a useless (and disappointingly uneloquent) ‘No, no, no’ as I wake. Then she has to stroke the horror away from me, like sluicing down a dog that’s come barking from a dirty river. (A History 225)

This description shows Barnes’s persona as a traumatized author-narrator living in a kind of surrealist middle ground between sleep and waking, characterized by the alternation of acute bouts of existential angst and terrifying nightmares of negation. Though a better sleeper than him, his _____________ 3

This interpretation was confirmed by Julian Barnes himself in an interview with Michael Ignatieff, when to the latter’s question: “How autobiographical was that ‘Parenthesis?’”, the writer answered “Entirely” (in Guignery, The Fiction 63). The autobiographical element is further enhanced by the fact that the half chapter may be read as a response to Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body, a novel that was partly inspired by Jeanette Winterson’s love affair with Julian Barnes’s wife, Pat Kavanagh.

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wife is also sometimes prey to nightmarish terrors with a Kafkaesque touch: “Less often, it’s her sleep that’s broken by a scream, and my turn to move across her in a sweat of protectiveness […]. ‘A very large beetle’, she will say […]; or ‘The steps were slippery’; or merely […]. ‘Something nasty’” (ibid.). The only difference is that she is better than him at handling fear: Sleep democratises fear. The terror of a lost shoe or a missed train are as great as those of guerrilla attacks or nuclear war. I admire her because she [...] handles it like a sophisticated traveller unthreatened by a new airport. Whereas I lie there in the night with an expired passport, pushing a baggage trolley with a squeaking wheel across to the wrong carousel. (226)

As the comparison of himself to a traveler heading towards the wrong carousel suggests,4 the narrator’s life-journey is no heroic quest for individuation and wisdom, but rather a terrifying and purposeless vicious circle of endurance against the backdrop of terrorism and the fear of nuclear extinction. This description leaves no doubt that A History of the World belongs in the category that Steven Connor has called the novel about “Endings and Living on,” a type of historical novel that attempts to negotiate the collective trauma caused by the Second World War and its aftermath. As Connor explains: The experience of the Second World War and its aftermath provided a particular, historically unprecedented set of fears and misgivings with regard to history. The effect of the discoveries of the concentration camps in which the Nazis had pursued their systematic programmes of extermination, combined with the knowledge of the huge power of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, rapidly produced a sense that the unimaginable had taken up residence in history. With the beginning of the Cold War and the rapid development of huge arsenals of nuclear weapons by both sides, the world began to face the possibility, for the first time within history, of its own ending as a datable, historical event. (English Novel in History 199)

As Connor further explains, “[t]he fact that our century has been brought closer and closer to the possibility of absolute ending occurring within the timespan of an individual life has provided a certain challenge to narrative as well as significant kinds of contortion within narrative structure […]. The unthinkable must first be thought in order to preserve its unthinkability, must be made actual in imagination in order to remain purely potential in fact” (200, 201). Connor’s remark reinforces Higdon’s contention that formal experimentation is a necessary condition for the expression of trauma. Further, as Geoffrey Hartman points out in “Trauma within the Limits of Litera_____________ 4

This interpretation is enhanced by the original meaning of carousel as a medieval knights’ tournament.

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ture,” contemporary society struggles under “the impact of specific historical shocks like the Holocaust and other genocides, but also [under] the impact of electronic media on the feelings of viewers, especially the transmission of what Luc Boltanski has named “distance suffering” (souffrance à distance)” (258). Consequently, “hurt, striking deeper than we realize, also comes through the radical inadequacy of what is heard or read, when the words searched for cannot address or redress other shocks, including visual images with a violent content” (259). In this anaesthetized and inarticulate cultural context, literature becomes the tool for the recognition of our inadequacy in expressing pain: “If there is a failure of language, resulting in silence or mutism, then no working through, no catharsis, is possible. Literary verbalization, however, still remains a basis for making the wound perceivable and the silence audible” (ibid.). The fragmentariness and palimpsestic structure of A History of the World, its assumption of various narrative masks and voices and its playful parodying of literary genres,5 is then ideologically and ethically significant, a symptom of the inadequacy of traditional novelistic forms to represent trauma. Echoing this, Barnes’s persona, like Beckett’s author-characters, struggles between the compulsion to express his anguish and terror and his incapacity to find an adequate means of expression. Unable to verbalize his trauma he concludes that the only antidote for his excruciating pain and fear is the shudder of love for his wife that he feels at particular moments, for instance, when he settles “against the soft zigzag of her body” and without waking, she “reaches up with her left hand and pulls the hair off her shoulders […] leaving me her bare nape to nestle in” (A History 226). His realization that, once faith and certitude are lost, love is the only truth that remains situates Barnes’s persona in the position of the lyrical voice in Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867).6 As he tells the reader, his greatest wish would be to write about love, but he knows that the task is impossible, that “there is no genre that answers to the name of love prose” (236). Thus, echoing St Augustin’s via negativa, he sets about defining love by enumerating what it is not. Discarding all sorts of ready-made assumptions about it, he concludes that love is essential to give human beings “our individuality, our purpose” precisely because it is “unneces_____________ 5 6

On this, see Vanessa Guignery’s “Palimpseste et pastiche génériques chez Julian Barnes” 4052. “Ah, love, let us be true/ To one another! for the world, which seems/ To lie before us like a land of dreams,/ So various, so beautiful, so new,/ Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,/ Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;/ And we are here as on a darkling plain/ Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,/ Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

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sary,” “an excrescence, a monstrosity, some tardy addition to the [evolutionary] agenda” (ibid.): I can tell you why to love. Because the history of the world, which only stops at the half-house of love to bulldoze it to rubble, is ridiculous without it. The history of the world becomes brutally self-important without love. Our random mutation is essential because it is unnecessary. Love won’t change the history of the world […] but it will […] teach us to stand up to history, to ignore its chinout strut. I don’t accept your terms, love says; sorry, you don’t impress, and by the way what a silly uniform you’re wearing. [...] Love makes us see the truth, makes it our duty to tell the truth. (240)

Thus, love becomes “a starting-point for civic virtue. You can’t love someone without imaginative sympathy, without beginning to see the world from another point of view” (243). The narrator’s contention that love requires an imaginative effort to see the world from somebody else’s perspective echoes Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics of love and his definition of the ethical moment as a disinterested movement going outside the selfenclosed identity and towards the absolutely other, what he describes in Totalité et Infinit as an epiphanic encounter with the face of the other. Defined in these terms, the moral duty imposed by love to tell the truth necessarily involves the rejection of Hegelian World History, with its totalizing tales of objectivity and endless progress. Thus, the narrator rejects history’s reduction of the discovery of America to a two-line description of Columbus’ transatlantic journey,7 and demands that we rewrite the historical events from the perspective of the ordinary sailor who won the bounty promised to the first man to sight the New World, but never got the prize because Columbus claimed it for himself (Barnes, A History 241). His proposal to recuperate a historically irrelevant fact erased from World History echoes the New Historicists’ suspicion of totalizing master-narratives and their preference for analyses of particular case-studies. Thus, the imaginative shift in perspective required to narrate this petit récit may be said to set the structural and ideological pattern for the whole novel, which is no other than the building of one among many possible alternative Histories of the World, by filling some of the gaps left in Biblical and World History with similarly marginal stories of fear, violence, lovelessness, death and survival, each narrated or focalized from the perspective of a historically irrelevant individual and loosely covering Genesis, the _____________ 7

“‘In fourteen hundred and ninety-two/ Columbus sailed the ocean blue’/ And then what? […] Everyone became wiser? People stopped building new ghettoes in which to practise the old persecutions? […] No, that’s too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago” (Barnes, A History 241).

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Middle Ages, the modern and contemporary periods, and the afterlife in a consumerist, godless heaven. As pointed out above, the author-narrator connects all the stories that make up his alternative History of the World by transforming, through repetition and variation, a series of anecdotal events into a net of significantly charged, recurrent motifs. Thus, for example, he links the story of the Spanish sailor robbed of his prize by Columbus with the woodworm’s eye-witness account in Chapter 1 of the dove “elbowing the raven from history” after it returned with the olive branch to Noah’s Ark (ibid.). The story is repeated again in Chapter 4, “The Survivor”, whose protagonist, Kathline Ferris, constantly tries to remember the lines that follow the lyrics: “In fourteen hundred and ninety two/ Columbus sailed the ocean blue” (83). At the same time, the connectedness between this chapter and the half chapter on love is enhanced by the fact that Kathline, like Barnes’s persona, lives in a schizoid, surrealist world, trying to decide which of the two versions of her survival from a nuclear accident is true: her own or that of the psychiatrists who look after her. As Steven Connor has pointed out, for Kath, “the challenge is to resist the story told to her by the men in the dream, and to begin telling stories differently,” while “for the doctors in Kath’s dream, the rest of her story is accounted for as “fabulation,” a process in which, as they tell her, “‘you make up a story to cover the facts you don’t know or can’t accept. You keep a few true facts and spin a new story round them’ (109)” (233). Connor singles out this chapter as representative of the “narrative of survival,” a type of eschatological narrative that manages to represent absolute ending by presenting the apocalyptic moment as the starting point for a subsequent narrative of survival (204). However, the same label could be applied to the novel as a whole, since most of the stories it contains are apocalyptic stories of confrontation, death and survival, even if, more often than not, the survivors are not exemplars of Darwin’s fittest or morally superior individuals. The apocalyptic tone of the whole novel is set in Chapter 1, where the Flood provides the starting point for the narrative of survival. The woodworm’s account is very witty and amusing; however, a tenebrous picture soon develops that equates the Ark with a prison (Barnes, A History 4), and shows the animals living in a growing “atmosphere of paranoia and terror” (22), that provokes the cryptic coloration of some of them as “a chronic reaction to ‘the Admiral’” (12), and leads others to “decline to survive on the insulting terms offered them by God and Noah, preferring extinction and the waves” (8). Noah has excluded some species from the Ark, like snakes and woodworms, for religious or practical reasons, but he has also divided the chosen species into “clean” and “unclean” for no apparent reason. The animals eventually realize that these euphemistic

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terms really stand for “edible” and “unedible” (10, 11). The division subsequently justifies both the systematic killing of redundant members of the “clean” species to feed the humans on board and the extermination of the “unclean.” As the narrator remarks, the true reason for this extermination was that the animals labeled as unclean “were all cross-breeds,” and Noah and his tribe “had this thing about the purity of the species” (15, 16). Thus, through the imaginative substitution of human beings for animals, the unbroachable motifs of racial hatred and genocide are made representable.8 The motif of classification and extermination is repeated in several other chapters. For example, in Chapter 2, “The Visitors,” a gang of Arab terrorists classifies the tourists for execution according to the nation they belong to (57) and forces the cruise lecturer to retell contemporary history from an Arab perspective.9 In Chapter 5, “Shipwreck,” the survivors of a shipwreck start disagreeing on how to meet the situation and end up killing and eating each other. Or also, in Chapter 7, “Three Simple Stories,” where the third is the story of the transatlantic journey of several hundreds of Jews trying to escape from the Nazi regime, embarking from Hamburg on May 13, 1939 and ending more than a month later with the Jews being sent to the concentration camps of various European countries, after having been denied asylum in Cuba, the US and Britain (18188). At the end of Chapter 1, the woodworm concludes that “man is a very unevolved species compared to the animals” (28), that human beings “aren’t too good with the truth” (29), and that they prefer to invent beautiful lies rather than accept ugly facts (ibid.). Ironically having recourse to the same dichotomizing logic as Noah, the insect opposes the mythical and fabulous human version of the Flood to its own truthful account, insisting that it is the objective (i.e., historical) rendering of a detached and impartial eye-witness: “I was never chosen. In fact, like several other species, I was specifically not chosen. I was a stowaway […]. When I recall the Voyage, I feel no sense of obligation; gratitude puts no smear of Vaseline on the lens. My account you can trust” (4). The irony lies, of course, in that this narrator-historian is a talking animal who only exists in the fictional realm of fable, and has been created by an act of Julian Barnes’s imagination. _____________ 8 9

J. M. Coetzee uses the same method of substitution to similar effects in The Lives of Animals. “He talked of early Zionist settlers [….] The Second World War. European guilt over the Holocaust being paid for by the Arabs. The Jews having learned from their persecution by the Nazis that the only way to survive was to be like the Nazi. Their militarism, expansionism, racism” (55).

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Fables are whimsical stories, often originally invented to amuse children, that teach a moral lesson. Thus, the woodworm’s criticism of the human tendency to fabulate can be read as a proleptic meta-comment on the moral value of art, a subject which will be developed at length in “Shipwreck.” Following the same via negativa he had used to define love, the narrator analyses in this chapter the way in which Théodore Géricault transformed the real events of a dreadful shipwreck into a painting entitled The Raft of the Medusa (1819). The narrator enumerates “what he did not paint” (126), and explains how Géricault sacrificed historical fact and accuracy of detail to composition and structural balance. Thus, he painted twenty instead of the original fifteen survivors and arranged them harmonically: “six in favour of hope and rescue […] six against. In between […] eight more figures […]. Six, six and eight: no overall majority” (131). The result of this composition is that the historical event is transformed into an organically whole and beautiful representation of possible or necessary (rather than actual) human actions. Thus, confronted with the painting, the modern spectator who does not know the historical facts, can still respond to its artistic truth: “Modern and ignorant, we reimagine the story: do we vote for the optimistic yellowing sky, or for the grieving greybeard? Or do we end up believing both versions? The eye can flick from one mood, and one interpretation, to the other” (133). Thus, where the historical record produces in the reader “mere pity and indignation,” (136) the figures in Géricault’s painting “are sturdy enough to transmit such power that the canvas unlooses in us deeper, submarinous emotions, can shift us through currents of hope and despair, elation, panic and resignation” (137). The truth the painting tells, like the truth Julian Barnes aspires to express in A History of the World, is, then, a cathartic truth about “our human condition”: “the moment of supreme agony on the raft, taken up, transformed, justified by art, turned into a sprung and weighted image, then varnished, framed, glazed, hung in a famous art gallery to illuminate our human condition” (139). Needless to say, the narrator’s conception of art betrays the influence of Aristotle, or also, as Lionel Kelly suggests, of Matthew Arnold (10), but with the important difference that, for Barnes’s narrator, the artistic truth Géricault’s painting tells is neither eternal nor absolute, but rather time-bound and provisional. As he observes, once created, the masterpiece continues “in motion downhill” until it becomes “in part a ruin”: the colors progressively fade and, if we examine the frame, we “will discover woodworm living there” (Barnes, A History 139). It is this paradoxically cathartic though provisional artistic truth about the human condition, requiring the artist’s ethical positioning from the disinterested perspective of love that

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Julian Barnes seeks to capture in his History of the World as a healing alternative to the nightmarish master-narratives of World History. In her analysis of A History of the World, Christina Kotte, as we have seen, set out to undo “the rigid opposition between revisionist historical fiction as an ethically valid form of postmodern historical fiction on the one hand, and historiographic metafiction as ethically myopic on the other.” However, when she comes to the half chapter on love, she is surprised by what she describes as the narrator’s “desire to safeguard the notion of objective truth”: a curious tension builds up within Barnes’ narrative, for although the ten stories in Barnes’ History of the World question the notion of an objective representation of history in various ways, the narrative’s metafictional half-chapter is fuelled by the very desire to safeguard the notion of ‘objective truth’ from a complete dissolution into fabulation. This comes as a little surprise to the reader. (98)

Kotte’s reluctance to consider the possibility that an experimental writer might wish to assert “some sort of certainty” (100), while simultaneously insisting on “the impossibility of universality and teleology” (101), forces her to conclude that Barnes is not a truly postmodernist writer, that he in fact “negotiates the same kind of double-bind that Gibson has shown to be characteristic of both neo-humanism and recent moral philosophy” (ibid.). This conclusion leaves Kotte’s original aim unfulfilled, since, instead of taking the ethical worries of Barnes’s narrator as evidence that historiographic metafiction is not necessarily “ethically myopic”, she prefers to define A History of the World as a nostalgic neo-humanist novel masquerading as experimental postmodernist fiction. Kotte’s conclusion is the more ironic in that it can only be reached by adopting the either/or oppositional logic that Julian Barnes is at pains to supersede, whereby postmodernism is associated with utter relativism and neo-humanism with absolute value. In the light of this, it might help to recall Steven Connor’s warning in Theory and Cultural Value that “one of the features of this opposition between the absolute and the relative is that it provides no common frame within which to assert both claims, since each position derives its identity from its repudiative characterization of the other” (xi). In order to avoid falling into the trap of being “construed and condemned by one side as itself tyrannically absolutist, or by the other as insufficiently armed against the corruptive force of relativism,” Connor contends that “we should attempt the difficult feat of thinking absolutism and relativism together rather than as apart and antagonistic [… and] accept the radical self-contradiction and unabatable paradox of value” (1, 2). In “The Ethics of Criticism”, Heinz Antor further justifies the need to rethink value from this paradoxical, both/and perspective when he says that it is precisely because we “live in a post-teleological and post-essen-

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tialist age in which universal truths and norms can no longer be proved […] that we can and even ought to take a stand, form our own judgments and compare our evaluations with those of others. The anthropological necessity of positioning ourselves […] then, turns into an ethical must” (74, original emphasis). This is the ethical challenge and the difficult imaginative feat that Julian Barnes sets himself to respond to in A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, as my reading of the novel has hopefully managed to demonstrate.

References Antor, Heinz. “The Ethics of Criticism.” Why Literature Matters: Theories and Functions of Literature. Eds. Rüdiger Ahrens and Laurenz Volkmann. Heidelberg: Winter, 1996. 6585 Barnes, Julian. A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters. London: Cape, 1989. —: “Author Statement.” The British Council Contemporary Writers. http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth1#authorstatement (27.11.2007) Connor, Steven. Theory and Cultural Value. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. —: The English Novel in History 19501995. London: Routledge, 1996. Craps, Stef. Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of Graham Swift: No Short-Cuts to Salvation. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005. Guignery, Vanessa. “Palimpseste et pastiche génériques chez Julian Barnes.” Études Anglaises 50.1 (1997): 4052. —: The Fiction of Julian Barnes: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism. Houndsmill: Macmillan, 2006. Hartman, Geoffrey. “Trauma within the Limits of Literature.” European Journal of English Studies 7.3 (2003): 25774. Higdon, David Leon. “‘Unconfessed Confessions’: The Narrators of Graham Swift and Julian Barnes.” The British and Irish Novel since 1960. Ed. James Acheson. New York: St. Martin’s, 1991. 17491. Kelly, Lionel. “The Ocean, The Harbour, The City: Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters.” Études britanniques contemporaines 2 (June 1992): 110. Kotte, Christina. “The Moral Negotiation of Truth in Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters.” Christina Kotte: Ethical Dimensions in British Historiographic Metafiction: Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, Penelope Lively (Studies in English Literary and Cultural History). Trier: WVT, 2001. 73106. Oates, Joyce Carol. “But Noah Was Not a Nice Man.” New York Times Book Review (1 October 1989): 1213. Rushdie, Salman. “Julian Barnes.” Salman Rushdie: Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 19811991. London: Viking, 1991. 24143.

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Stringer, Jenny, ed. The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. 46.

VERA NÜNNING (HEIDELBERG)

Ethics and Aesthetics in British Novels at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century Strangely enough, ethics has become a key word in the discourse of postmodernism.1 During the last few decades, ethical considerations once again entered the domain of literary criticism as well as philosophical works, and many critical approaches to literature—like gender studies, ecological criticism or postcolonial criticism—focus on questions which involve ethical dimensions. Mostly, however, these works do not consider formal aspects of literary works, their structure and narrative techniques by means of which the topics are conveyed. Even scholars like Wayne C. Booth, whose The Rhetoric of Fiction was a landmark in the study of the novel, shy away from any formal considerations when concerned with the ethics of a given work.2 It seems to be assumed that narrative conventions are not important to the ethics of a novel, and that we all recognize whether immoral behavior like rape or murder is implicitly criticized or condoned in a literary work, and whether individual characters are meant to be models held up for imitation or villains to be abhorred. With regard to eighteenth- or nineteenth-century fiction, this nonchalance may to some degree be justifiable—after all, official and unofficial censorship ensured that most authors made quite clear what was to be thought of the characters and events in their stories. Often there is a heterodiegetic narrator embodying the “communal voice,” thus providing a view of the story that would have agreed with the conventional morality of the age.3 Comments by the narrators serve to evaluate what is happening on the level of the story, their analyses of the characters’ motives provide further enlightenment, poetic justice makes sure that the good characters are rewarded in the end, and the just distribution of sympathy— _____________ 1

2 3

See Connor (14). The very negation of ethics by postmodern scholars has led to a heated debate about its importance: “precisely because ethics […] is dead […] the question of ethics has become all important” (Madison/Fairbairn 2). Others, who assume that postmodernism ended in the 1980s, claim that the renewal of attention for ethics at that time mark the beginning of a new era from the 1980s onwards; see Zimmermann (13). See Booth, The Company We Keep. Heinze (274f.) summarizes the views of scholars who claim that narrative form is crucial to the ethics of a novel, but he does not provide clues as to how this thesis might by applied to works of literature. A notable exception is Müller. See Ermarth (65-92).

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held to be very important by Victorians—allows readers to feel pity with those who are good but unfortunate, while the villains are painted in appropriately dark colors. While the study of the ethics of Victorian fiction is impeded by the problem that, as yet, we do not know just how this “distribution of sympathy” works—and critics usually refuse to enlighten us why they think a character is implicitly criticized or held up for admiration— contemporary literature is much harder to deal with. The postmodern feature of indeterminacy defies any simple value judgments, and even ethically outrageous behavior is presented in ambivalent terms. 1. Post-Modernism and the Ethical Implications of Alterity, Indeterminacy and Sympathy With regard to contemporary fiction, the discussion of ethics is usually concerned with postmodernist literature. While the proclaimed pluralism, fragmentation and dedifferentiation as well as the predominance of parody and play were often thought to be linked to an ethical indifference, scholars nowadays tend to adopt a more balanced view and try to single out ethical concerns in postmodern English and American literature.4 According to a scholar well versed in the history of philosophy and ethics, postmodernist aesthetics are inherently ethical, because devices like defamiliarization, metafictional commentary or the presentation of the grotesque initiate an experience of alterity: If multiplicity, heterogeneity or alterity are the predominant features of this period, as regards both society and individual search for identity, contemporary ethics must […] promote an ethical stance that will […] enable us to live in it with dignity. […] Thus, if the aesthetics of postmodern art furthers the development of a sensibility which not only allows us to endure, but also enables us to find pleasure in a high degree of alterity, and if a little of this would trickle through into ethical sensibility, this would already be an enormous improvement. (Grabes 25f.)

One might well argue that fiction should enable readers to “develop a sensibility” that allows us to appreciate multiplicity and alterity; the question is, however, whether this appreciation can be brought about by feeling aesthetic pleasure which then “trickles through” into ethical sensibility. Though I would subscribe to the ethical importance of being exposed to experiences of alterity, I am not sure whether there is an analogy between _____________ 4

The importance of ethical indifference for several theories of postmodernism is expounded by Zima. Nowadays, ethical concerns and didacticism are even claimed to be characteristics of the work of Martin Amis, whose stories abound with violence, victimization and abuse; see Diederick. The return to ethics in American contemporary literature and philosophy is the topic of the collection of essays published by Gerhard Hoffmann and Alfred Hornung.

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the experience of alterity produced by literary devices and the experience of and attitude towards individuals who are perceived as “other.”5 After all, postmodernist texts usually create a distance between characters and readers, and it is difficult to understand why this distance should endorse the acceptance of pluralism and alterity in daily life. If fellow human beings are perceived as “other”, and if characters bear some resemblance to “life-like” individuals (or are at least naturalized according to the reader’s implicit personality theories), it is rather counter-intuitive to assume that a postmodernist distance from these characters will lead us to accept or even respect others. For Christopher Butler, this distance towards others has had detrimental effects; he therefore criticizes “those who have been so vigorously concerned for the liberation of the group in attacking stereotypical prejudices [because they] have let slip a viable notion of the individual with which one can have sympathy. In so doing they removed one of our strongest motives for moral action” (Butler 69; emphasis by Butler).6 If we follow Butler, there is something to be said for good old realist fiction, with its life-like characters and lack of distancing devices: It is certainly easier to feel sympathy for or antipathy against a character who is not put at one remove by means of a plethora of defamiliarizing devices. While I grant that the experience of alterity is important, I would therefore argue that it should be related to life-like characters, with whom one can have sympathy. The acceptance and approval of characters who are different from the reader may even lead to an acceptance of others in real life. The insight into the difference to and appreciation of others is ethically important, for, according to Alain Badiou (41), the acceptance of alterity and the radical difference between oneself and everybody else (including oneself) is a cornerstone of a theory of ethics. It would be rather premature, however, to wish for the return of realism and its power to evoke sympathy. We have to live in a society marked by multiplicity, heterogeneity and alterity. To enable us to appreciate this, to accept otherness, to refrain from stereotyping as well as categorizing others and to _____________ 5

6

Quite a number of scholars assume that there is an analogy between the structures of literature and those of ethics or real life, but they usually refer to the experience of alterity with regard to the content of a work, not with regard to distancing devices (see Antor 70f.) or they claim that the structures inherent in aesthetics, as well as those in ethics and life, necessitate difference, multiplicity and heterogeneity (see Welsch 15-21). Butler is thinking of important theorists like Roland Barthes or Michel Foucault, who nonetheless devoted much of their time to social causes. One can, however, make a case for the thesis that ethical questions have been part of French poststructuralist theories from the beginnings of the 1970s onwards—in the works of Foucault or Julia Kristeva and even Roland Barthes, whose “plaisir de texte” can be read as an ethics of desire or an ethics of difference (see Ette 199-242, 378-426).

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abandon the insistence on closure, would be a great achievement. The exposure to alterity and indeterminacy, which is a hallmark of postmodernist fiction,7 seems to be more in tune with these demands than realism. In the following, it will be argued that a number of contemporary novels have moved beyond postmodernism and combine assets of both postmodernist and realist devices. They evoke the experience of alterity and defy closure, but they nonetheless create life-like characters and refrain from using the defamiliarizing devices of postmodernism. The experience of alterity is produced by different means and linked to two other features. On the one hand, it is accompanied by a destabilization of an accepted ethical framework as well as an uncertainty with regard to the fictional facts, thus creating indeterminacy with regard to interpretation and meaning. On the other hand, alterity is combined with the evocation of sympathy for the protagonists, which in turn is geared towards an acceptance, perhaps even an appreciation of “the other.” The narrative features of these novels, which highlight indeterminacy, alterity and sympathy, are in accord with a Levinas-inspired ethics, which has moved away from the prescriptive dimension of traditional humanist values towards a more tentative and open postmodern ethics. The representation of key characters allows us to feel empathy with them and to develop an understanding of and sympathy for different, even contradictory viewpoints, which renders it more difficult to condemn their limitations. The narrative form thus induces us to comprehend contradictory positions, making alterity more acceptable and moving towards an “ethics of alterity.” In contemporary British fiction, this experience of alterity is made possible by the use of different narrative forms. First, some novels concentrate on a character’s view of the world which is not corrected, evaluated or challenged by the narrator. Instead, the beliefs of the focalizers (which are often less than homogeneous or coherent in themselves) are destabilized by other devices. The reticence of the heterodiegetic narrator, who abstains from both epistemological and ethical guidance, is more pronounced in a second type of novel which employs the similar, but more unusual narrative device of juxtaposing the stories of different homodiegetic narrators without connecting them to each other. These novels even lack a homogeneous level of discourse, since the narrators’ voices and mind-styles are often quite contradictory, thus emphasizing the fact that there is no stable ethical framework. Thirdly, there is a new use of the device of unreliable narration, which is rendered ethically even more complex in so far as the reader is not able to construct the story _____________ 7 Grabes (25); see also Hassan (87, 92).

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“behind the narrator’s back” any more. Thus, the notorious problem of the reader developing sympathy for an ethically unreliable character—for instance the egotistic porn-freak John Self in Martin Amis’ Money: A Suicide Note (1984)—and the danger of their being drawn to the view of the world such a narrator projects is enhanced by the fact that it is more or less impossible to find out whether the protagonist is to be blamed or to be pitied. In the following, I will discuss three novels which illustrate my theses. 2. A New Use of Modernist Aesthetics: Julian Barnes, Arthur and George (2005) The first type of novel might be seen as a mere rehash of modernist conventions. The fact that some novelists, who in the 1970s and 1980s employed “postmodern” narrative devices, are now turning to this apparently traditional way of writing should make us suspicious, however. Sharing many features with Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005) uses only one focalizer, but nonetheless highlights both alterity and indeterminacy. If anything, the unfeasibility of closure is even more pronounced in Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories (2004), which presents several unsolved and seemingly unrelated cases of abduction or murder, three of which are haphazardly investigated by a private detective.8 Even Julian Barnes, who played with pluralism, parody, metafiction, authenticity, fragmentation and dedifferentiation in novels like The History of the World in 10 and ½ Chapters (1989) and England, England (1998), refrains from postmodernist devices in his latest novel. Arthur and George (2005) belongs to a new tendency in British fiction, which renders the past through a modernist emphasis on “seeing” (highlighting the perceptions of a character), rather than through a postmodern “telling” (highlighting the presence of a narrative voice).9 While postmodernist historical fiction often concentrated on the Victorian period, a number of novels published during the last few years seem to favor the turn of the century, which in itself was marked by the emergence of modernist styles of writing.10 _____________ 8 9 10

Because of the use of the genre conventions of detective fiction and the pronounced fragmentation, however, the novel also sports some postmodernist features. Cf. Connor (10). Cf. Colm Tóibín, The Master (2004) and David Lodge, Author, Author (2004), both of which focus on the life of Henry James; Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) is concerned with World War I and its aftermath. Barnes’ novel is set in the late Victorian period, when doubts concerning key Victorian beliefs were well on their way.

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At first sight, Arthur and George seems to be an unproblematic fictional biography of two historical characters, but the novel soon questions the truth of the events put forward in the course of the narrative, in which the order in which information is distributed carries meaning. Readers are often given significant (fictional) facts belatedly, which forces them to doubt and re-assess what they have read before, and to accommodate it with the information given later on. This device is used right from the beginning. At first Arthur seems to be the more unconventional of the two protagonists, growing up in an impoverished household, with his mother inculcating the code of chivalry into the young boy; to be “[f]earless to the strong; humble to the weak” (Arthur and George 5) is what he learns from her strange and exciting stories. In contrast, George is the son of a vicar and imbibes the faith of the Anglican Church. His catechism, routinely tested by his father, also requires faith in his country and answers like “England is the beating heart of the Empire, Father” (17). If he is an outsider, it is because of his bad eyesight and his determination to do very well at school. After twenty pages or so, however, readers are required to adjust their image of the two characters: “Irish by ancestry, Scottish by birth, instructed in the faith of Rome by Dutch Jesuits, Arthur became English” (23); he turns out to be Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.11 George, on the contrary, is the son of an immigrant; the serene Anglican vicar is a Parsee and was born in Bombay. This comes as a shock, since George’s views and his mind-style are almost stereotypically English: his pragmatism and his emotional reticence, even his thinking, which is deeply inspired by his admiration for the law, suggest that his self-image as an Englishman is not far off the mark. In the field of the ethics of truth, this defamiliarization is of crucial importance, because it highlights the impossibility of closure and denies the promise of stable knowledge which might allow us to judge others and their behavior. In what follows, Arthur and George are shown to live in different worlds; Arthur becomes more and more popular, while George is subjected to different kinds of racism; he is harassed by the police and ultimately sentenced to seven years of penal servitude, because he allegedly killed local cattle at night. The two protagonists are similar in one respect, though: since we get to share both their thoughts and feelings, we see the world through their eyes and are invited to feel sympathy for them. It is significant that we come to know them as children, when both are more or less victimized: Arthur lives in an unstable household; his deranged _____________ 11

In order to make this experience of re-assessment possible, Julian Barnes persuaded his publisher “not to blare Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s name on the dustjacket” (Wigod n. pag.).

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father is declared “mad” and removed to a hospital when his mother cannot cope with the situation any more. George’s unfair treatment, which he suffers without any complaints, highlights his vulnerability and his lack of chances to lead the “ordinary” married life that he hopes for. The insight into his consciousness may well evoke the reader’s sympathy for the ungainly child, who is unlucky in many respects. The very Englishness of the family and the high regard in which they hold Imperial ideals make the racist harassment seem even more unfair.12 Although the modernist set-up precludes the use of postmodern defamiliarizing devices, the reader is exposed to an experience of alterity. This experience is double-layered: First, it relates to the experiences, values and beliefs of the characters, which are difficult to understand from the point of view of modern readers. Secondly, the mode and order in which information is distributed ensure that events that have been related earlier suddenly appear in a different light: what has become “familiar” and has been rationalized in one way earlier, now seems to be “strange” and has to be interpreted differently. One aspect of the experience of alterity is highlighted by the mode of narration, which allows us to share their thoughts and feelings. While George could quite literally be seen as “the other,” who is exposed to unjust and cruel behavior, Arthur’s attitudes are difficult to stomach from a twenty-first century point of view: He remains firmly set against female suffrage, and his belief in spiritualism seems rather quaint today. The distance between today’s readers and the famous author is heightened by archaisms and circumlocutions which, as one reviewer stressed, “are entirely absent from the original text[s]” by Arthur Conan Doyle and are meant “to create a sense of antiquity where none exists” (Winder n. pag.). A different experience of strangeness is evoked by the unexpected turns of the narrative, which make the familiar suddenly appear unfamiliar. Quite late in the narrative we are given a fact that does not fit George’s character and attitudes at all: he needed money quite desperately. This serious, emotionally reticent man, who is only interested in the laws of England and his family, apparently ran into debt and had to ask three different moneylenders for a loan.13 This incident remains inexplicable, _____________ 12

13

The reader’s feeling of sympathy is mentioned in some of the reviews: Natasha Walter in The Guardian (online edition, n. pag.) claims that “naturally, we sympathise with George.” The immediacy with which we sympathizes for George’s plight as a child is heightened by the use of the present tense—as opposed to the past tense in the passages dealing with Arthur. Later on, when Arthur experiences an emotional crisis, this initial distribution of the tenses is reversed, and his thoughts and feelings are rendered in the present tense. In an interview, Julian Barnes said that his own belief in his understanding of the historical events that provide the basis of the novel was shaken when he looked up George’s letter in Birmingham Central Library, thinking that perhaps: “‘[i]t is more complicated. Maybe

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and it suggests a side of George’s character that has not come to light so far. This throws doubt upon the reliability of the narrative, because there must be important secrets in George’s life which have not been mentioned before. The character sketch that the novel provides is certainly incomplete, but it may well be misleading as well. The incident therefore raises the question of the truth of the fictional facts. These doubts, which contribute to the impression of indeterminacy and instability, are heightened by many implicit references to the power of discourse. The novel contains excerpts from and summaries of many different genres—newspaper reports, excerpts from (misspelled) anonymous letters, bits of Arthur’s autobiography (which give a surprisingly racist account of the Edalji case) and a parliamentary report which is so far off the mark that it is dismissed as a “novella” by Sir Arthur, who asks whether it is “protected by Parliamentary privilege” (Arthur and George 308). Since the stories told by these sources are incompatible with each other, the question of truth and (lack of) conviction is foregrounded. This becomes most obvious during the trial, in which there is so much at stake for George. Because of the “adjustments” made by the police, George does not recognize his own story any more.14 In contrast to the fabricated tale put forward by lawyers, the story told by his honest parents is not convincing at all, a fact which does not surprise George’s solicitor: “the best people are not necessarily the best witnesses. The more scrupulous they are, the more honest, […] the more they can be played with […] It’s a question of belief […]. From a purely legal point of view, the best witnesses are those whom the jury believes most” (140). This raises the question of whom the reader is to believe, and it is no coincidence that Barnes considered “Conviction” as a possible title for a book in which the problematic relation between seeing and believing is of crucial importance.15 Is the credibility of the focalizers determined by their character, or is it a matter of discourse, of the ways of distributing information, of techniques to evoke sympathy?16 Arthur was convinced that _____________ 14 15

16

something is going on.’ He [George] wasn’t as clean as that, maybe. On the other hand, maybe he was” (Hanks n. pag.). “[I]f his story was subtly changing around him, then so too were some of the characters” (123). Barnes only rejected “Conviction” as a title because it was too close to McEwan’s Atonement (cf. Jeffries n. pag.). In a very perceptive review, Magdalena Ball draws attention to the importance of seeing in Arthur and George, which ranges “from the simple impact of optical myopia to the complex impact of metaphorical myopia” (n. pag.). When George refuses to acknowledge that racist prejudices are at least partly responsible for his sentence and his failure to get the financial restitution that is due to him, Arthur

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George is innocent even before he was in full cognizance of the facts, and he is equally convinced of the more than doubtful fact that he has found the true criminal. Even George, who has the most orderly mind imaginable, is willing to wave evidence when it comes to believing what Sir Arthur says: “If Sir Arthur said that he knew a thing, then the burden of proof, to George’s legal mind, shifted to the other fellow” (335). If evidence and proof are not of primary importance, even to a “legal mind,” the persuasiveness of witnesses—and focalizers—is determined by other factors, which cannot be weighed according to rational processes. The question of what to believe, and the necessity of re-vis(it)ing former convictions, is conspicuously raised again at the very end of the book, when the rational, disbelieving George attends a large séance held in honor of the recently deceased Sir Arthur. The book ends with George staring at the platform, on which various “witnesses” in the audience have claimed to see the body of the deceased Sir Arthur: What does he see? What did he see? What will he see? (357)

These three questions are the only sentences in the novel that are explicitly attributable to the heterodiegetic narrator,17 and they cast doubt upon everything the reader has read. “What does he see?” provokes readers to think about what George knows, feels and believes—and makes them aware of how little they know about this character. The second question might call into question the previous account of “what the lawyer saw.” If the story as told in the novel is true, the question is meaningless—George saw what we have been told. If the question is relevant, however, it implies that we might not have been given the “true” facts. The last question is especially interesting: if it is important what George will see in the future, then why does the narrative not continue? Could another, as yet unknown piece of information cast new light on our interpretation of the story, and necessitate yet another re-adjustment?

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confirms that George “is a first-class witness. It is not his fault if he is unable to see what others can” (217). There are some phrases or even adjectives that imply value judgements by the narrator, but these are always embedded in the presentation of the fictional facts or the focalizer’s thoughts or feelings; before the end of the book there are no whole sentences which can be identified as statements by the narrator—let alone questions.

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3. Ethical Implications of the Juxtaposition of Several Narrators In the second group of works under consideration, indeterminacy is again related to the question of truth, which here is highlighted by the “multiperspective” form of the novels, in which several homodiegetic narrations are placed next to each other. The experience of alterity is enhanced by means of the alternation between different—partly incompatible—views, feelings and mind-styles. Their “otherness” is emphasized by the lack of a heterodiegetic narrator, who would at least provide a link between the characters and a homogeneous style. Here, the mode of “telling” prevails. In many of these novels, alterity is emphasized by the idiosyncrasies of the narrators, who are anything but average. Sometimes the lack of common ground between readers and narrators is enhanced by the remoteness and strangeness of the setting. Sarah Water’s Fingersmith (2002), for instance, takes place in the nineteenth century: one of the characters grows up as an orphan in a “family” of thieves of Dickensian proportions, while the other is forced by her uncle to be his amanuensis in his categorization of works of pornography. The same holds true for Matthew Kneale’s historical novel English Passengers (2000), which presents us with a broad spectrum of accounts dealing with the settlement of Australia in the nineteenth century and ranging from an Aborigines over British-born doctors, governors, vicars, convicts, soldiers and ladies to a smuggling Manxman. The narrators in Graham Swift’s Last Orders (1996) go to the seaside in order to spread the ashes of their former friend, and those in Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down (2005) have for various reasons decided to commit suicide. Indeterminacy is ensured by the incompatibility of the narrative voices.18 This is quite pronounced in English Passengers, in which the Aborigines’ interpretation of events differs quite markedly from those of the white governors and even the well-meaning white ladies. While the English, for instance, think of Robson as a hero because he saved the Aborigines by making them stop their wars with the whites and follow him to the Settlement on Flinders Island, the Aborigines, who have been lured to the island under false pretences, consider him a traitor. Both interpretations are understandable: because of their illnesses and the inferiority of their weapons, the Aborigines were doomed to lose the war against the settlers––especially when large numbers of white volunteers were mustered. Searching for the natives, approaching them, and leading _____________ 18

Fingersmith is a notable exception here, since the riddles are more or less solved at the end of the story. In spite of this, the reader is at a loss for several hundred pages, and even in the end, the daughters’ relation to their (foster-)mother, which is of major importance throughout the novel, can only be guessed at.

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them to the island on which they are given shelter and allowed to follow some of their old traditions, Robson risked his life, and probably saved them from an even speedier extinction. On the other hand, he acted as a traitor, because the natives would have killed him and themselves rather than follow him voluntarily to such doom. In this and many other instances, a final reckoning seems to be impossible. The multiperspective form of these novels, which juxtaposes several narrators and highlights indeterminacy, has ethical implications. The difficulties of deciding whose account we can believe raises the question of whether there are any absolute ethical values—or whether, as for instance Alain Badiou (43, 61, 65-81) claims, there is no ethics “in the abstract” but only an “ethics of truths”, which acknowledges that truth can only be related to (come into being in) particular situations and particular individuals. The immediacy of the narrators’ thoughts and feelings, which is not impeded by the presence of a mediating heterodiegetic narrator, allows us to feel empathy with them and to develop an understanding of and sympathy for different, even contradictory viewpoints. That at least some of the narrators in each novel can engage the readers’ sympathy renders it more difficult to condemn their limitations. The narrative form thus induces us to comprehend contradictory positions at the same time, making alterity more acceptable. The ethical implications of the juxtaposition of several narrators become more complex when the question of the reliability of these narrators is foregrounded. Unreliable narration is per se a problematic narrative device as far as the ethics of a novel are concerned. After all, unreliable narrators tell their story from their own point of view; they allow us insight into their thought processes and justify their behavior in accordance with their own norms, thus inducing readers to empathize with them. A skilful handling of free indirect discourse may allow for some ironic distancing between the narrator and the focalizer, which may be picked up by careful readers—but with regard to unreliable narrators this kind of distance becomes at the same time crucial and problematic.19 The relation between _____________ 19

For the ethical implications of a skilful use of free indirect thought as a means of moral criticism, see Müller (123-28). According to Booth, the differentiation between reliable and unreliable narrators is based on “the degree and kind of distance” (The Rhetoric 155) that separates a given narrator from the implied author of a work. At the same time, Booth freely admitted that the terminology for “this kind of distance in narrators is almost hopelessly inadequate” (158). Since the early 1960s, a lot of research has been done on the textual clues and frames of reference which allow readers to arrive at the conclusion that the narrator is “morally and intellectually deficient” (7) and can be detected by them on the basis of their “mature moral judgment” (307). But in spite of many criteria which allow scholars to identify unreliable narrators, ethical unreliability is still difficult to pin down, because it relies on the norms and values of the individual reader—a paedophile would

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ethics and unreliable narrators with questionable norms and values is thus fraught with contradictions. On the one hand, the confrontation with radically different views may turn this kind of fiction into a valuable vehicle for ethics, because it evokes an experience of alterity. In addition to that, the exposure to morally questionable views—and their fictional consequences—may initiate a reflection on the reader’s own, different ethical principles. On the other hand, the fact that the reader gets insight into the consciousness of a morally suspect narrator and is invited to share his thoughts and feelings, may lead to the development of sympathy for the narrator and his questionable ethics.20 The ethical implications of unreliable narration are rendered even more interesting by a new use of unreliability in contemporary English fiction. In quite a number of novels published during the last decade it has become increasingly hard to identify morally “unreliable” narrators and their problematic approach to truth and ethics; the boundaries between “reliable” and “unreliable” narrators are blurred.21 For the representation of ethics this has two main consequences. First, it is even more difficult to decide which part of the narrator’s thinking and behavior is morally acceptable and which not; and secondly, the distinction between the (supposedly moral) readers and the (morally questionable) narrator becomes obscure. It might be possible to recognize that seemingly radically differ_____________ 20

21

probably find nothing wrong with the behavior of the notorious Humbert Humbert in Lolita. This danger is acknowledged by James Diedrick, who claims that Martin Amis’s novels are didactic, because they satirize and criticize society and moral mores. With regard to the narrator John Self in the novel Money, however, even Diedrick supposes that, in spite of themselves, most readers will “warm to him,” while few “will experience Self merely as a monster of wretched excess” (74). Wall has argued that Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) not only “challenges our usual definition of an unreliable narrator,” but also “deconstructs the notion of truth, and consequently questions both ‘reliable’ and ‘unreliable’ narration and the distinctions we make between them” (18, 23). Ansgar Nünning (94) has supported this view, claiming that other novels of the 1980s also call into question conventional notions of unreliable narration. He also mentions that Graham Swift’s stories and novels “both foreground and challenge the problematic notions of truth, objectivity, and reliability on which realist theories of unreliable narration are based.” While I agree that British novels of the 1980s did not subscribe to simple notions of truth and reliability, I would argue that the degree of doubt cast on the concept of “unreliable narration” is significantly enhanced in novels published from the late 1990s onwards. With regard to a character like Stevens in The Remains of the Day, we have no reason to doubt that the story he tells of his relationship with Miss Kenton is not true, although we also realize that he does not even admit that to himself. His self-delusion is highlighted, and it remains to the reader to call him “unreliable” because of this, or “reliable” because of the insight he allows us into his feelings and delusions. The novels I will deal with here, however, demonstrate that evaluations of unreliability can be blatantly wrong, and that they stage the characters’ idiosyncrasies in such a way as to render it impossible to attribute either reliability or unreliability to them.

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ent people are, as Nick Hornby suggests in A Long Way Down, “like you and me” (109). Thus it becomes less easy to nurse the feeling of moral superiority that dyed-in-the-wool unreliable narrators like Humbert Humbert or John Self could evoke. The ethical framework of contemporary novels has become unstable. 4. Unreliability and the Juxtaposition of Several Narrators in Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down (2005) The form of Nick Hornby’s novel A Long Way Down is similar to Kneale’s English Passengers, for it also features several narrators who tell their own stories, which allows us a direct insight into their (albeit strange and quaint) thoughts and feelings. Instead of highlighting the incompatibility of the characters and the instability of the ethical framework, however, this novel foregrounds the problem of reliability. At the beginning of the novel, the narrators do not seem to be very reliable, and the differences between average readers and the four characters who accidentally meet on New Year’s Eve on the roof of London’s favorable suicide spot could not be more pronounced. As one of the narrators, Jess, realizes, all of them are sad in a way unknown to others: “something had happened to us which separated us from lots of other people” (A Long Way Down 64). The reasons for their despair are as disparate as the characters are: Martin, a famous TV-personality lost everything because of an affair with a girl who turned out to be only fifteen years old. Jess, an incredibly aggressive, foulmouthed teenager, cannot cope with her family and the fact that she has been dumped after a fleeting affair. JJ, an American stranded in England, has lost both his girlfriend and his dream of success as a musician. And Maureen, a very polite, altruistic and serious single mother of a physically and mentally disabled child, believes she cannot live with the knowledge that her whole life will be spent caring for her son. All the characters can be labeled ethically “unreliable” in one way or another.22 Jess, for instance, has outrageous principles which can only be called “ethical” by a wide stretch of the term; she does not refrain from lying outrageously or putting the others under pressure; and by perceiving a bland and superficial character like “Nodog” as “deep”, she gives us every reason to doubt her powers of perception and interpretation as well. _____________ 22

James Phelan and Mary Martin have distinguished between unreliability with regard to the reporting of the facts that are presented (axis of facts/events), unreliability with regard to the perception and understanding of fictional events (axis of knowledge/perception), and unreliability with regard to values (axis of ethics/evaluation). In the following, I will concentrate on the ethical unreliability of the narrators.

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Martin begins his story by giving the reasons for his decision to commit suicide and comparing them to ridiculously inadequate arguments for or against emigrating to Sidney; and JJ’s wish to end his life seems so illfounded to himself that he claims to be terminally ill in order to explain his decision to the others. Even Maureen, who is certainly the most ethically reliable character (she worries about having lied to her son, though he is unable to understand anything she says), is unreliable in some respects. When she describes her first meeting with the American JJ, she involuntarily gives us insights into the prejudices which cloud her understanding: My own feeling about JJ, without knowing anything about him, was that he might have been a gay person, because he had long hair and spoke American. A lot of Americans are gay people, aren’t they? I know they didn’t invent gayness, because they say that was the Greeks. But they helped bring it back into fashion. Being gay was a bit like the Olympics: it disappeared in ancient times, and then they brought it back in the twentieth century. (28f.)

The heterogeneity and strangeness of the characters is underlined by the fact that they tell their stories in their own voice: readers are exposed to very different mind-styles and encounter alterity at first hand. The incompatibility of their world-views as well as their contradicting each other raises the question of whom we should believe. Martin, for instance, is derisive about a game called “quizzies”, and tries to convince the reader as well: “Do you know what ‘quizzies’ are? Neither did I, until my first night. ‘Quizzies’ are when drugged-up psychos hurl questions at each other” (157). Maureen, however, loves them, and the fact that she is given the opportunity to sometimes participate in them makes a big difference to her life. The strangeness that is predominant if one looks at the characters’ attitudes and actions, is, however, counteracted by the style of narration. All of the four narrators use a plethora of reader addresses and engage in a conversation with the reader. In the equivalent of a style that would have been termed “easy and familiar” in the eighteenth century, they chat about their lives and explain how they arrived at their fatal decision.23 The book begins with Martin’s rhetorical question: “Can I explain why I wanted to jump off the top of a tower-block? Of course I can explain why I wanted to jump off the top of a tower-block. I’m not a bloody idiot” (3), and Maureen assumes that the reader may not understand her feelings about what she has told her son concerning the supposed “New Year’s party,” when she will leave him allegedly for just one night: “The moment I told him, I wanted to go straight to confession. Well, I’d lied, hadn’t I?” (4) _____________ 23

Bernhard praises the boldness of Hornby’s strategy and calls the voices “chatty and colloquial” (n. pag.).

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She takes it for granted that the reader will ask the question why she wanted to go to confession––and she answers it, using another rhetorical question in the process. These and many other forms of reader address establish a communicative bond, which makes it easier for readers to understand the characters.24 It is possible to feel with them and comprehend just why all of them act in ways that can only be called rather odd at first sight. Their decision to commit suicide certainly crossed a line “that separated them from other people”, but in the course of the novel their despair and the reasons for their behavior become more and more understandable. Just how easy it is to cross the border between the spheres of “normality” and “alterity”, between “self” and “other”, is involuntarily demonstrated by Jess when she gives us her reasons for feeling nervous before she sees Maureen’s son for the first time: It’s all that having to pretend they’re just like you and me when they’re not, really, are they? I’m not talking ‘disabled’ like people who have only got one leg, say. They’re all right. I’m talking about the ones who aren’t right up top, and shout, and make funny faces. How can you say they’re like you and me? OK, I shout and make funny faces, but I know when I’m doing it. Most of the time I do, anyway. With them there’s no predicting, is there? They’re all over the place. (109)

By granting that she “shouts and makes funny faces” herself, Jess reveals that the difference between her and the disabled is not as absolute as she would like to think (and the reader may be forgiven the thought that being unpredictable and “all over the place” is a very neat characterization of Jess, too). Hornby thus takes the juxtaposition of several narrators a step further than Kneale. By foregrounding otherness as well as the question of unreliability, and at the same time reducing the distance between the reader and strange as well as (supposedly) unreliable narrators, he emphasizes the common ground between self and other. He evokes the experience of alterity only to meliorate it and to induce sympathy for the other, thus turning unreliable narration into a powerful vehicle for ethics. 5. Foregrounding Indeterminacy: Experiments with Unreliable Narration in Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal (2003) Although Zoë Heller’s novel Notes on a Scandal features only one unreliable narrator, its use of indeterminacy results in an ethical instability which questions the very possibility of judging others. During the course of the _____________ 24

Rüdenauer (n. pag.) thinks that the characters are so likeable and sympathetic that the reader is made to compare them with him- or herself.

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novel it becomes increasingly obvious that Barbara, the pompous elderly history teacher, is a more or less conventional unreliable narrator, and an unsympathetic one at that. Nonetheless, the novel experiments with the use of unreliable narration as a means of raising ethical concerns, because Barbara does not tell her own story, but the story of her friend, the 42year old Sheba Heart, whose life breaks into pieces as she loses her job, her husband and her children as a consequence of having an affair with one of her pupils, Steven Conolly. What starts as the simple account of Sheba’s misdemeanor soon becomes quite complex, when it turns out that the ‘scandal’ referred to in the title might relate to Barbara’s opinion (she thinks that she herself is scandalously wronged by Sheba) and her ominous actions. Usually, the device of unreliable narration is employed in order to show that the ostensible story a character tells about him- or herself is quite wrong; in fact, he (or, very rarely, she) is deluded, mad or simply lying, while the reader can make out the true story “behind the narrator’s back.” This is partly true of Barbara’s story, as well. Just as the butler Stevens in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989), with whom Barbara shares the formal register, the reticent style, the emphasis on recalling what happened earlier and the emotional depravation, Barbara unwittingly tells the reader a story that she herself is not aware of. While she presents her behavior as that of a sincere friend, who waits patiently until the flimsy Sheba recognizes the older woman’s worth, and who then sacrifices herself in order to help Sheba in a difficult situation, Barbara unintentionally reveals that she is an egocentric tyrant, who ruthlessly pursues her plans in order to ensnare Sheba, who persecutes her and meddles with her privacy, who betrays her great secret and who finally succeeds in putting an end to her own loneliness by living with Sheba. Barbara’s egocentric motives are inadvertently disclosed when she realizes that her plans might fail after all: Since then, various hitches in my brilliant plan have occurred to me. For one thing, I’m not sure if the terms of Sheba’s bail will allow her to travel so far. And even if they do, Sheba may refuse to let me go with her. I have been trying to prepare myself for this possibility, but the thought is intolerable. How will Sheba ever manage on her own? Who will do the shopping and cook her meals? Who will make sure she showers every day? I’m not sure I can bear it if I have to go back to being on my own again. (Notes on a Scandal 240)

What is masked as concern for Sheba’s welfare—and in the context of the story it is quite absurd to suggest that a woman who has cared for her family and managed her job, her teenage daughter and a small son with Down syndrome would be unable to cook her own meals—turns out to be an egotistic urge to share Sheba’s life.

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So far, the use of unreliable narration is rather conventional. It becomes more interesting, however, when we do not consider ‘the scandal’ of Barbara’s behavior, but Sheba’s misdemeanor. As becomes clear right at the beginning, Sheba has done the unthinkable and abducted a minor, Steven having only been 15 years old when their affair began. If we can believe what Barbara tells us about Sheba’s account of what happened, however, the story is not so simple. Steven had a crush on his teacher; he followed her for weeks while she tried to avoid him, and then succeeded in getting his way. He soon seems to lose interest, however; Sheba has to discover that he carries on with other girls (he has already had five other affairs with younger girls before her) and is concerned mainly with his own sexual needs. When Sheba visits him, for instance, he is curt with her, makes her first lie on the carpet, sleeps with her again in the bed and then produces “a single, slightly flattened cigarette, and a box of matches: ‘Nothing like one afterwards, is there?’ he said” (149).25 While this sounds rather callous, it does not impair Sheba’s loyalty to him. According to Barbara, Sheba “remembers having to suppress a smile at this studied, post-coital nonchalance” (ibid.). The problem is, however, that we do not know whether we can trust Barbara’s account. If her story is right, than Sheba, far from being the monster that the media make her out, is not only the victim of Barbara, but also of Steven. Of his views, nothing is known except the short answer he gives to the reporters, saying that he “fancied” Sheba. But although this seems to confirm Barbara’s story, we have only her word for the description of this scene, too. Moreover, Sheba continues to believe in Steven, even when she realizes that he meets other girls and does not say a single word in her defense later on. When Sheba accidentally sees and reads Barbara’s ‘notes’ at the end, she regards them as “filth and lies”: “‘You’re mad! How did I never see it before? You’re mad! You really believe this stuff is the truth. You write about things you never saw, people you don’t know’” (236). It is rather disconcerting, though, that we have no means of knowing whether Sheba continues to idealize a worthless 16year old, or whether Barbara’s egotism has twisted the straight accounts Sheba might have given her of her affair. On the one hand, we have no reason to believe Barbara, since she obviously does not tell the truth about herself. On the other hand, we have no indications which might justify _____________ 25

See also: “They made love rather quickly and—at Connolly’s behest—on the floor. Sheba was fearful of carpet burns, but not wanting to spoil Connolly’s youthful fantasy of sexual abandon she went along with the idea. When he got up abruptly to fetch a towel to lay beneath them, she eagerly suggested that they could move to the bed if he was uncomfortable. But Connolly shook his head. He wasn’t uncomfortable, he said. He just didn’t want to stain the carpet” (ibid.).

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doubts concerning her story of Sheba’s affair. After all, Barbara is not emotionally involved in it, since it did not interfere with her own plans— in the end it even leads to her sharing a flat with Sheba. Whether we get a more or less truthful account of the affair or something wide off the mark is therefore impossible to determine. With regard to the ethical issue involved in an affair between a 42-year old woman and a 15- and 16-year old boy, the novel shatters the clichés circulated by the media and raises more and more questions during the course of the narration, but it does not give any answers. In this novel, indeterminacy is once again related to the experience of alterity. Being exposed to the views of a sixty-plus, self-deluded virgin brimming with frustration and hate is probably a rather unique experience for most readers.26 Apart from Barbara’s loneliness, there are no redeeming features which might induce readers to feel pity or sympathy with her, and her ruthlessness in trying to break into Sheba’s life probably neutralizes such benevolent emotions. It is different, however, with regard to Sheba. Even when the media coverage is presented at the beginning of the story, the reaction of some viewers—mainly men who comment on Sheba’s attractiveness—renders it difficult to concur with the media’s sense of outrage against this much-maligned woman. The fact that Sheba loses everything and is not even allowed to see her children any more by her husband, who quickly asks his 25-year-old assistant to take care of them, may induce the reader to feel sympathy with this woman, who is in the end forced to live with the very person who has brought about her downfall. But while the victimization of Sheba, who is cast as the perpetrator, but who may have been exploited by Steven and continues to be exploited by the relentless Barbara, may call forth the reader’s pity, the ending forestalls a positive view of her. During the difficult days before the trial, Sheba works on a sculpture of a mother and a son, with the son lying in the mother’s lap. Disconcertingly, the mother’s face resembles Sheba’s, while the son’s features are those of Steven. The uncertainty regarding Sheba’s guilt or innocence resembles the uncertainty regarding fictional facts in Arthur and George; again, we have to take into account the order of the distribution of information.27 At first we are presented with the fact of Sheba’s sexual affair with a minor. During the course of the novel, when the reader learns to look through Barbara’s motives and to evaluate Steven’s behavior, Sheba seems to be a _____________ 26 27

While some reviewers remarked upon the narrator’s pompousness and unreliability, no one expressed any sympathy for her. Only Margaret Stead conceded that she is “complex, at once touchingly sad and repellent.” As Susan Tranter commented with regard to Barbara: “Heller’s art is to then subtly reverse our loyalties” (n. pag.).

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victim, who is, moreover, abandoned by her husband and children. While this may induce a feeling of sympathy with Sheba, the reader has to reassess the question of Sheba’s guilt at the end, when the desire for incest is hinted at as an underlying motive. Far from being a victim of Barbara, Steven, and her husband’s hypocritical intransigence, Sheba may have behaved in a way that is even more scandalous than the media suggest. In a novel with such an unstable ethical framework, any kind of value-judgment is impossible. 6. Conclusion Although the novels which have been discussed do not sport any “postmodern” devices, indeterminacy and instability feature prominently in them. In Barnes’ Arthur and George, the chronological order of distributing information raises the question of whether all of the important facts have been told. In Nick Hornby’s novel it is impossible to distinguish between reliable and unreliable narrators, and Zoë Heller undermines any attempt at understanding—let alone evaluating—the scandal that is referred to in the title. These and similar contemporary novels can thus be read as instances of a new departure in British literature, which might initiate a new phase of postmodernism—though one has to bear in mind that postmodernist features were never very pronounced in British fiction, anyway. Nonetheless, there seems to be a shift during the 1990s, when even novelists who had resorted to postmodernist conventions in their earlier work, began to prefer modernist or even realist devices.28 This move away from postmodernist techniques does not necessarily imply any antipathy towards experiments, however. Instead, the creative use of modernist and realist narrative conventions can fulfill some of the key functions of postmodernist devices—those of indeterminacy and instability—which are now achieved by means appropriate to an audience who have by now become familiar with postmodernist defamiliarizing conventions. Although the claim that the majority of novels published after the mid-nineties are as _____________ 28

The interest in (un)reliability is not involved in this move away from postmodernism, since the unreliable narrator is a time honored device of British and American fiction since the early nineteenth century, but at least one would be hard put to claim any link between postmodern narrative devices and unreliability. One could argue, though, that this interest in unreliability—and particularly in juxtaposing several (un)reliable narrators—ties in with the postmodernist preference for telling instead of seeing. This joining of postmodernism and unreliability is not very convincing, however, since it disregards the fact that the combination of several unreliable narrators was used mainly from the mid-1990s onwards, when the discussion about the demise of postmodernism was well on its way.

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subtly experimental as the novels under consideration would be just as presumptuous and short sighted as the thesis that British fiction from the late 1950s onwards is postmodernist fiction, one might still suggest that, during the last decade or so, we can witness a new turn in British literature. More experimentally minded novelists achieve their effects by using devices that are modernist and realist rather than postmodernist, while highly acclaimed new authors like Zadie Smith or Andrea Levy resort to modernist features in their latest novels. There are still plenty of novels which hold on to the dear old realist devices, but with regard to the complex relation between modernism and postmodernism, modernism seems to be more attractive at the turn of the twenty-first century than it was a hundred years ago. In the novels discussed in this essay, the experience of alterity, which has been regarded as a key asset of postmodernist aesthetics, is evoked by an innovative application of modernist and realist techniques. As focalizers or narrators, the protagonists expose contemporary readers to strange thought processes. This is most obvious in Nick Hornby’s suicidal characters and in Barbara’s account of a turning point in her friend’s life. But even Barnes’ characters make for unfamiliar reading, as Arthur’s code of chivalry is by now as quixotic as his belief in spiritualism, and George’s perceptions as a victim of racism evoke the experience of “the other.” In addition, the novels use different means of bringing about the experience of alterity. Hornby and Heller have taken the opportunity to present alterity with the help of unreliable narration, while both Heller and Barnes evoke alterity on a structural level: in Arthur and George, the fictional facts which are accepted as true at a certain point of the reading process have to be re-visited and re-evaluated later on, and at the end of Notes on a Scandal, the question of Sheba’s guilt or innocence has to be addressed in a new light. Since we are repeatedly made aware that our assessment of the supposed facts is quite beside the point, we might, moreover, develop a more open-minded and liberal attitude with regard to our judgment of others. Moreover, all of the novels turn fiction’s power to develop sympathy with life-like (if quaint) characters to good account. By balancing the experience of alterity with the feeling of sympathy, they bridge the gap between self and other, encouraging readers to respect—and perhaps even appreciate—otherness. Both Arthur and George are partly victimized, likeable characters, and Heller uses Barbara’s outrageous motives and actions to encourage sympathy for Sheba, who seems to be a victim for a long stretch of the story. Hornby even turns the danger of the reader developing sympathy for morally questionable (un)reliable narrators into an advantage. By presenting strange, seemingly unreliable narrators, the novel at first evokes the experience of alterity. This experience, however, begins

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to fade as the “other” is made to appear more and more like the self, and when it turns out that there is no fixed boundary between unreliability and reliability, between “alterity” and “normality”. In these novels, the experience of alterity is linked to both destabilization and the evocation of sympathy, therefore inducing us to develop an attitude that is more tentative and open, while at the same time appreciative of the other. Employing quite different narrative conventions, these works open up a way of combining aspects of realist and postmodernist aesthetics: connecting the realist evocation of sympathy with life-like characters with the postmodernist experience of alterity, indeterminacy and instability, they have produced an ethically viable aesthetics that is in tune with present-day life.

References Amis, Martin. Money: A Suicide Note. London: Cape, 1984 Antor, Heinz. “The Ethics of Criticism in the Age after Value.” Eds. Rüdiger Ahrens and Laurenz Volkmann. Why Literature Matters: Theories and Functions of Literature. Heidelberg: Winter, 1996. Atkinson, Kate. Case Histories. London: Doubleday, 2004 Badiou, Alain. Ethik: Versuch über das Bewusstsein des Bösen. Transl. by Jürgen Brankel. Wien: Turia und Kant, 2003.. Ball, Magdalena. “Nothing Elementary about Julian Barnes.” Rev. of Arthur & George, by Julian Barnes. m/c reviews 06 November 2005. http://reviews.media-culture.org.au/article.php?sid=1346 (12.12.2007). Barnes, Julian. Arthur and George. London: Cape, 2005. —: England, England. London: Cape, 1998. —: The History of the World in 10 and ½ Chapters. London: Cape, 1989. Bernhard, Brenden. “Suicidal Redundancies.” Rev. of A Long Way Down, by Nick Hornby. LA Weekly 16 June 2005. http:// www.laweekly.com/books/548/suicidal-redundancies (12 Dec. 2007). Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961. —: The Company We Keep. An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Butler, Christopher. “Postmodernism and Moral Philosophy.” Ethics and Aesthetics: The Moral Turn of Postmodernism. Eds. Gerhard Hoffmann and Alfred Hornung. Heidelberg: Winter, 1996. 69-86. Connor, Steven. “Introduction.” The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism. Ed. Steven Connor. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 1-19.

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Diedrick, James. Understanding Martin Amis. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1995. Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. Realism and Consensus in the English Novel. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983. Ette, Ottmar. Roland Barthes: Eine intellektuelle Biographie. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1998. Grabes, Herbert. “Ethics, Aesthetics, and Alterity.” Ethics and Aesthetics: The Moral Turn of Postmodernism. Eds. Gerhard Hoffmann and Alfred Hornung. Heidelberg: Winter, 1996. 13-28. Hanks, Robert. “Julian Barnes: Resurrecting Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.” The Independent Online Edition 8 July 2005. http://enjoyment. independent.co.uk/books/interviews/article297543.ece (12 Dec. 2007) Hassan, Ihab. The Postmodern Turn:. Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture. Ohio: Ohio State UP, 1987. Heinze, Rüdiger. “‘The Return of the Repressed’: Zum Verhältnis von Ethik und Literatur in der neueren Literaturkritik.” Ethik und Moral als Problem der Literatur und Literaturwissenschaft. Eds. Jutta Zimmermann and Britta Salheiser. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2006. 265-281. Heller, Zoë. Notes on a Scandal. London: Penguin, 2004. Hoffmann, Gerhard and Alfred Hornung, eds. Ethics and Aesthetics: The Moral Turn of Postmodernism. Heidelberg: Winter, 1996. Hornby, Nick. A Long Way Down. London: Viking, 2005. Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day. London: Faber & Faber, 1989. Jeffries, Stuart. “‘It’s for self-protection.’” The Guardian 6 July 2005. http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0 ,,1522030,00.html (12 Dec. 2007) Kneale, Matthew. English Passengers. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2000. Lodge, David. Author, Author. London: Secker & Warburg, 2004. Madison, Gary B. and Marty Fairbairn, eds. The Ethics of Postmodernity: Current Trends in Continental Thought. Evanston : Northwestern UP, 1999. McEwan, Ian. Atonement. London: Cape, 2001. —: Saturday. London: Cape, 2005. Müller, Wolfgang G. “Moralische Implikationen erzähltechnischer Innovationen bei Jane Austen.” Ethik und Moral als Problem der Literatur und Literaturwissenschaft. Eds. Jutta Zimmermann and Britta Salheiser. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2006. 117-132. Nünning, Ansgar. “‘But why will you say that I am mad?’ On the Theory, History, and Signals of Unreliable Narration in British Fiction.” Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 22.1 (1997): 83-105.

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Nünning, Ansgar and Vera Nünning, eds. Multiperspektivisches Erzählen: Zur Theorie und Geschichte der Perspektivenstruktur im englischen Roman des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts. Trier: WVT, 2000. Phelan, James and Mary Patricia Martin. “‘The Lessons of Weymouth’: Homodiegesis, Unreliability, Ethics and The Remains of the Day.” Narratologies. New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis. Ed. David Herman. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1999. 88-109. Rüdenauer, Ulrich. “Suicidal Tendencies.” Rev. of A Long Way Down, by Nick Hornby. literaturkritik.de. 7, July 2005. http://www.literaturkritik.de/public/rezension.php?rez_id=8286 (12 Dec. 2007). Stead, Margaret. “See Me After Class.” Rev. of Notes on a Scandal, by Zoe Heller. The Observer 1 June 2003. http://observer.guardian. co.uk/review/story/0,,967827,00.html (12 Dec. 2007). Swift, Graham. Last Orders. London: Picador, 1996. Tóibín, Colm. The Master. London: Picador, 2004. Trantor, Susan. Rev. of Notes on a Scandal, by Zoe Heller. EnCompassCulture April 2004. http://www.encompassculture.com /readerinresidence/botm/April04/ (12 Dec. 2007). Wall, Kathleen. “The Remains of the Day and its Challenges to Theories of Unreliable Narration.” Journal of Narrative Technique 24 (1994): 1842. Walter, Natasha. “Our Mutual Friends.” Rev. of Arthur & George, by Julian Barnes. The Guardian 2 July 2005. http://books.guardian.co.uk/ reviews/generalfiction/0,6121,1519179,00.html (16 Mar. 2007). Waters, Sarah. Fingersmith. London: Virago, 2002. Welsch, Wolfgang. “Ästh/etik. Ethische Implikationen und Konsequenzen der Ästhetik.” Ethik der Ästhetik. Ed. Christian Wulf et al. Berlin, 1994. 3-22. Wigod, Rebecca. “Case of the forgotten Victorian.” Vancouver Sun 29 October 2005. http://www.canada.com/vancouver/vancouversun/ news/books/story.html?id=bfe11a06-9fcf-4e51-87cafa2cc4455ceb (12.12.2007). Winder, Robert. “Bumps in the Night.” Rev. of Arthur and George, by Julian Barnes. New Statesman 11 July 2005. http://www. newstatesman.com/Bookshop/300000100204 (12 Dec. 2007). Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. 1925. London: Penguin, 1992. Zima, Peter V. Moderne/Postmoderne: Gesellschaft, Philosophie, Literatur. 1997. Tübingen: A. Francke, 2001. Zimmermann, Jutta. “Einleitung: Ethik und Moral als Problem der Literatur und Literaturwissenschaft.” Ethik und Moral als Problem der Literatur und Literaturwissenschaft. Eds. Jutta Zimmermann and Britta Salheiser. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2006. 9-24.

Notes on Contributors MARSHALL BROWN is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Washington (Seattle), and editor of Modern Language Quarterly. His books include The Shape of German Romanticism (1979); Preromanticism (1991); Turning Points: Essays in the History of Cultural Expressions (1997); and The Gothic Text (2004). Under contract with the University of Washington Press is ‘The Tooth That Nibbles at the Soul’: Essays on Poetry and Music. SIMON COOKE is a doctoral student in Literary and Cultural Studies at Justus Liebig University Giessen, where he holds a scholarship at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) and a parttime post as a research assistant to Professor Ansgar Nünning. His doctoral research is on contemporary travel writing. He is the third co-author, with Richard Humphrey and Ansgar Nünning, of Essential Study Skills for Bachelor/Master in British and American Studies (2007) and his first academic article is “‘Always somewhere else’: Generic ‘Unclassifiability’ in the Work of W.G. Sebald” (in Gattungstheorie und Gattungsgeschichte, 2007). ASTRID ERLL is Professor of English Literature and Culture at the University of Wuppertal. Her main fields of interest are British literary and cultural history, cultural memory studies, postcolonial studies, media theory, and narratology. Publications include Gedächtnisromane (2003); Kollektives Gedächtnis und Erinnerungskulturen (2005); Literature and the Production of Cultural Memory (co-edited with Ann Rigney; EJES 10.1 (2005)); and a book on the medial representations of the Indian Mutiny (Prämediation— Remediation, 2007). Together with Ansgar Nünning she is general editor of the series Media & Cultural Memory/Medien und kulturelle Erinnerung (since 2004) and co-editor of Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook (2008, in press). HERBERT GRABES is Professor of English at Justus Liebig University Giessen. He has published widely on English and American literature and literary theory, including monographs on the history of the mirror-metaphor, Nabokov’s novels, theoretical conceptions of literature, the history of early English pamphleteering and the history of American drama. He is co-editor of the yearbook REAL and currently working on the history of histories of English literature. The most recent of the many books he has edited are Writing the Early Modern English Nation (2001); Innovation and Continuity in English Studies: A Critical Jubilee (2001); Literary History/Cultural

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History: Force-Fields and Tensions (2001); Literature, Literary History, and Cultural Memory (2005); and, with Wolfgang Viereck, The Wider Scope of English (2006). WOLFGANG HALLET is Professor of Teaching English Literature and Culture at Justus Liebig University Giessen. He is a member of the Executive Board of the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) and Head of its Teaching Centre. He is co-editor of a book series with model interpretations of English and American literature, of a series of handbooks on teaching literature and culture, and of a major German bi-monthly journal on teaching English as a Foreign Language. He has published books and articles on the study of culture-related theories of teaching literature and culture, the contextualization of literary texts, and on cognition and literature. ANGELA LOCATELLI is Professor of English Literature at the University of Bergamo. She is Adjunct Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia). Her main research interest is literary theory. She has written extensively on Shakespeare and Renaissance culture and literature. Her publications also include a book on the “stream of consciousness” novel, and several articles on twentieth-century literature and drama. She has published the first edition (with an Italian translation) of Henry Peacham’s A Merry Discourse of Meum and Tuum (1639) (Il Doppio e il Picaresco, 1998), and has edited six volumes on literary theory (The Knowledge of Literature/La conoscenza della Letteratura, 2002-2007). She is one of the three general editors of EJES (The European Journal of English Studies). BJÖRN ALEXANDER MINX studied Applied Modern Languages with Business at the Justus Liebig University Giessen and graduated in 2006 with a thesis on “Literature and Ethics: Social Critique and Morality in the American World War II Novel.” Since January 2007 he has been Study Abroad Advisor in the Department of English at the Justus Liebig University Giessen. WOLFGANG G. MÜLLER holds the chair of English Literature at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. His fields of research include (1) theory and analysis of lyric poetry (monographs on Rilke’s Neue Gedichte, 1971 and on subjectivity and the lyric self in English poetry, 1979); (2) Shakespeare and Renaissance literature (edition of Dialog und Gesprächskultur in der Renaissance, 2004; edition of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, 2005); (3) theory of style (Topik des Stilbegriffs, 1981, and various articles); (4) rhetoric (numer-

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ous articles, for instance in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, 2001); (5) the tradition of Don Quixote in English literature, especially in the novel; (6) intertextuality (for instance an article on the relation between characters in different texts, a phenomenon he calls “interfigurality,” 1991); (7) the letter as a genre (articles); and (8) history of the English novel. A recent research project is devoted to the construction of an ethical narratology, which aims at a systematic exploration of the ethical implications of narrative techniques. BIRGIT NEUMANN teaches English Literature and Culture at Justus Liebig University Giessen. Since 2006 she has been Principal Investigator at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC). From 2005 to 2007 she was manager of the Collaborative Research Center “Memory Cultures” at Justus Liebig University Giessen. She has published in the field of memory, on cultural knowledge as well as identity and alterity, including her book-length studies on fictions of memory (2005), on the rhetoric of nation in 18th-century literature (Nationale Fremd- und Selbstbilder in britischen Medien des 18. Jahrhunderts: Die Rhetorik der Nation, 2008, forthcoming), and the study of narrative fiction (with Ansgar Nünning, 2008, forthcoming). ANSGAR NÜNNING has been Professor of English and American Literature and Cultural Studies at Justus Liebig University Giessen since 1996. He is the founding director of the “Giessener Graduiertenzentrum Kulturwissenschaften” (GGK) and of the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) as well as the academic director of the International PhD Programme (IPP) “Literary and Cultural Studies” and a member of the Collaborative Research Centre “Memory Cultures” (SFB 434). He has published widely on English and American literature, cultures of memory, narratology, and literary and cultural theory. His most recent publications include Metzler Handbuch Promotion: Forschung— Förderung—Finanzierung (2007, ed. with Roy Sommer); Essential Study Skills for Bachelor/Master in English and American Studies (2007, with Richard Humphrey and Simon Cooke); Englische Literatur unterrichten: Grundlagen und Methoden (2006, with Carola Surkamp); An Introduction to the Study of English and American Literature (3rd ed. 2006, with Vera Nünning); Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie (3rd ed. 2004); Kulturwissenschaftliche Literaturwissenschaft (2004, ed. with Roy Sommer); Erzähltextanalyse und Gender Studies (2004, ed. with Vera Nünning); and Konzepte der Kulturwissenschaften (2003, ed. with Vera Nünning). He is editor of the series Uni Wissen Anglistik/Amerikanistik, Uni Wissen Kernkompetenzen; WVT-Handbücher zum literaturwissenschaftlichen Studium; MCM: Media & Cultural Memory/Medien &

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kulturelle Erinnerung (with Astrid Erll); ELCH: English Literary and Cultural History (with Vera Nünning), and WVT-Handbücher zur Literatur- und Kulturdidaktik (with Wolfgang Hallet). VERA NÜNNING holds a chair of English Literature at Ruprecht Karls University Heidelberg. Since 2006 she has been Vice-Rector for international affairs in Heidelberg. She has published widely on British and American history as well as on English literature and culture from the 18th-20th centuries. Amongst her works are Die Ästhetik Virginia Woolfs (1990); Catharine Macaulay und die politische Kultur des englischen Radikalismus, 1760-1790 (1998); Einführung in die amerikanische Geschichte (with Jürgen Heideking, 1998); Englische Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts (with Ansgar Nünning, 1998); Der englische Roman des 19. Jahrhunderts (2000); Grundkurs anglistisch-amerikanistische Literaturwissenschaft (with Ansgar Nünning, 2001). Together with Ansgar Nünning she has edited several collections of essays, among them three on narratology (2002; 2004), and Konzepte der Kulturwissenschaften (2003). Among her most recent books are a cultural history of the English novel (from the Renaissance to the present; ed. 2005) and Der zeitgenössische englische Roman: Genres, Entwicklungen, Modellinterpretationen, (ed., 2007). Other publications include articles on English cultural history from the 16th to the 19th century, the culture of sensibility, literature and imperialism, gender studies, and British literature from the 18th to the 21st century. SUSANA ONEGA is Professor of English at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). She has written numerous articles and book chapters on contemporary British literature and narrative theory. She is the author of Análisis structural, método narrativo y “sentido” de ‘The Sound and The Fury’, de William Faulkner (1980); Form and Meaning in the Novels of John Fowles (1989); Peter Ackroyd: The Writer and his Work (1998); Metafiction and Myth in the Novels of Peter Ackroyd (1999); and Jeanette Winterson (2006). She has edited “Telling Histories”: Narrativizing History/Historicizing Literature (1995); edited and translated into Spanish John Fowles’ The Collector (1999); and co-edited Narratology: An Introduction (1996), London in Literature: Visionary Mappings of the Metropolis (2001), Refracting the Canon in Contemporary Literature and Film (2004), George Orwell: A Centenary Celebration (2005), and The Ethical Component in Experimental British Fiction since the 1960’s (2007). JAN RUPP is a doctoral student at Justus Liebig University Giessen, working on the connection between genre and cultural memory in Black British literature. He is also involved in a research project on imperialist self-

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fashioning at Justus Liebig University’s Collaborative Research Center “Memory Cultures.” MAX SAUNDERS is Professor of English at King’s College London, where he teaches modern English, European, and American literature. He studied at the universities of Cambridge and Harvard, and was a Research Fellow and then College Lecturer at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He is the author of Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 vols. (1996), the editor of Ford’s Selected Poems, War Prose and (with Richard Stang) Critical Essays (Carcanet, 1997, 1999, 2002), and has published essays on life-writing, on Impressionism, and on Ford, Conrad, James, Forster, Eliot, Joyce, Rosamond Lehmann, Richard Aldington, May Sinclair, Lawrence, Freud, Pound, Ruskin, Anthony Burgess, and others. He is also general editor of International Ford Madox Ford Studies. JÜRGEN SCHLAEGER is Professor of British Literature and Culture and Director of the Centre for British Studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin. He has published widely on English literature, on literary criticism in Britain and the U.S., on diaries and autobiographies, and on representations of emotions. Among his recent publications are London, The Metropolis (ed., Journal for the Study of British Culture 10.2 (2003)) and European Views on Englishness (ed., European Journal of English Studies 8.2 (2004)). He is the editor of Metamorphosis Structures of Cultural Transformation, 2005 (REAL 20). RONALD SHUSTERMAN is Professor of English Literature at the Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier, France and “Délégué scientifique” at the national research evaluation agency in Paris (AERES). His main field of research has been on the intersection of philosophy, aesthetics, literature and the arts—with publications in journals such as Poétique, Études Anglaises, Philosophy and Literature, and EJES on topics such as fiction and cognition, the role of metaphor, the Sokal affair, intention and interpretation, metaethics, and on poets and novelists including William Empson, James Joyce, B.S. Johnson, Malcolm Bradbury, and Graham Swift. His major publications include Critique et poésie selon I.A. Richards: de la confiance positiviste au relativisme naissant (1988) and, with Jean-Jacques Lecercle, L’Emprise des signes (2002). He has also edited three volumes of collected studies: Cartes, paysages, territoires (2000); L’Infini (2002); and Des Histoires du Temps (2003), and co-edited L’Art de plaire (2006). MARGIT SICHERT is an artist and critic. Contributing to a research project at Justus Liebig University Giessen, her main areas of enquiry are the his-

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tory of literary histories and American drama and theatre. Some of her publications are: Die mittelenglische Pastourelle (1991); “Claire Archer: A ‘Nietzscheana’ in Susan Glaspell’s The Verge,” REAL 13 (1997); “The Staging of Excessive Emotions: Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro,” REAL 16 (2000); “Race and Culture: Taine’s Vision of English Rennaissance Theatre as Teutonic Art” (2001); “Henry Morley’s First Sketch of English Literature: Literary History as Cultural History,” REAL 17 (2001); “Functionalizing Cultural Memory: Foundational British Literary History and the Construction of National Identity,” Modern Language Quarterly; “Implanting Literary History in Cultural Memory: Robert Chambers’ History of English Language and Literature,” REAL 21 (2005); and “The Old and the New: British Concepts of Writing the History of English Literature after Postmodernism,” Literatşra 49 (2007). ANNETTE SIMONIS is Professor of Comparative Literature and German Literature at Justus Liebig University Giessen. Her research areas include: aestheticism, Modernism, comparative arts, inter-arts studies, literary genres, literary theory, and literature and film/new media. Her publications include Literarischer Ästhetizismus: Theorie der arabesken und hermetischen Kommunikation der Moderne (2000); Zeitwahrnehmung und Zeitbewußtsein der Moderne (2000; ed. with Linda Simonis); Gestalttheorie von Goethe bis Benjamin: Diskursgeschichte einer deutschen Denkfigur (2001); Mythen in Kunst und Literatur: Tradition und kulturelle Repräsentation (2004; ed. with Linda Simonis); Grenzüberschreitungen in der phantastischen Literatur: Einführung in die Theorie und Geschichte eines narrativen Genres (2005). PHILIPP WOLF teaches English and American literature (as “apl. Prof.”) at Justus Liebig University Giessen and Politics, Economy, Ethics and English at a secondary school (“Integrierte Gesamtschule”) in Rödermark near Frankfurt (as a full-time “Studienrat”). He is the author of Die Ästhetik der Leiblichkeit: W.B. Yeats, die Moderne und das Andere der Vernunft (1993); Einheit Abstraktion und literarisches Bewusstsein: Studien zur Ästhetisierung der Dichtung, zur Semantik des Geldes und anderen symbolischen Medien in der frühen Neuzeit Englands (1998); and Modernization and the Crisis of Memory: John Donne to Don DeLillo (2002). He is also the co-editor of a book on the experience of cultural alterity, Wir und das Fremde (2004), as well as one on the ethical implications of nanotechnology and neuroscience, Nanotechnologie, Gentechnologie, moderne Hirnforschung: Machbarkeit und Verantwortung (2007). His further publications include articles on Yeats, Heaney and Heidegger, literary anthropology, aesthetics, literature and religion, money, consciousness, memory and ethics, and experimental film.

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HUBERT ZAPF is Professor of American Literature at the University of Augsburg. His main areas of research are literature and ecology, English and American literature, literary history, and literary and cultural theory. His major publications are Das Drama in der abstrakten Gesellschaft (1988); Kurze Geschichte der anglo-amerikanischen Literaturtheorie (2nd ed. 1996); Amerikanische Literaturgeschichte (2nd ed. 2004, ed.); Literatur als kulturelle Ökologie (2002); Theorien der Literatur: Grundlagen und Perspektiven (Vol. 1-3, ed. with H-V. Geppert, 2002-2007); and Literature and Ecology (ed., Special Issue of Anglia, 2006).