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Article Excerpt
The turn toward ethics within literary studies during the last two decades has been so widespread that contemporary scholars can no longer be said to ignore the ethical assumptions and implications of literary and critical texts. (1) Some scholars (e.g. Buell 9-10; Eskin, "Introduction"; Parker 33-34) have pointed out that this turn corresponds to a literary turn in ethics. However, this (double) turn--even if it has established the ethical importance of literature in itself and of reading literature, thereby contributing to the revaluation of certain works (Gibson 1; Eskin, Ethics)--has engendered more disagreement than consent. Scholars who endorse an ethical approach to literature share neither assumptions about literary theory and interpretation nor conceptions about the essence or the meaning of ethics. These heterogeneous, conflicting, and often incommensurable approaches confirm Jean-Francois Lyotard's point of departure in his book The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. In this essay, I attempt first to outline some of the significant differences among the leading approaches to ethical criticism in literary studies and to point out the possible contribution of Lyotard to these ongoing disputes. This preliminary section is followed by an interpretation of John Fowles's The Collector in light of Lyotard's thesis and its ethical implications. Finally, I contend that Fowles's novel illuminates and challenges Lyotard's conception of differend, especially in its relation to narrative.
Lyotard's thesis in The Differend is significant to ethical literary criticism, particularly concerning novels, for three main reasons: first, because it is based on a linguistic model of communication that highlights the connections between terms extensively discussed in literary studies, such as addressor, addressee, referent, sense, and, of course, discourse. Second, despite Lyotard's reductive conception of narrative (which will be dealt with toward the end of this essay), his insights regarding the perpetual competition between discourses that generate irreconcilable conflicts can contribute to the understanding of the structure of narrative discourse. Indeed, the novel has been recognized by some leading literary scholars, for example Mikhail Bakhtin and Martha Nussbaum, to extend our all-too-limited experience and to intensify the encounters between conflicting voices or world-views that occur in ordinary language by intentionally and consciously intersecting various discourses, including ones that do not usually interrelate (Nussbaum 47-48; Bakhtin 298). The third reason for the importance of Lyotard to literary ethics, which deserves a separate discussion in another essay, is his belief that ethics cannot be separated from politics, nor can justice be from goodness. This conception allows literary critics to link the political (as well as the social and the historical) to the ethical, instead of regarding them untenably as mutually exclusive (see Parker 194). (2)
For the sake of clarity, I focus on two of the main approaches to ethics within literary studies: the (neo-)humanist and the Levinasian. In suggesting this division, I claim neither that all scholars of Levinas's work hold to a single view nor that all (neo-)humanists do. Instead, I point out some of the presuppositions and views that some prominent scholars of each approach share with each other despite significant differences between them. Furthermore, humanism and Levinasianism do not exhaust the approaches to ethical literary criticism (see Buell; Eskin, "Introduction" and "Literature").
Humanists and Levinasians have starkly different premises regarding the essence of both ethics and literary texts. Although Lyotard's views are closer to those typical of Levinasians, I shall demonstrate that the moral thesis implied by his differend can be neither identified with nor subsumed under the Levinasian conception of the radical Other.
The point of departure of humanist literary criticism, represented most prominently in the work of scholars like Cora Diamond, Samuel Goldberg, Alisdair MacIntyre, Colin McGinn, Martha Nussbaum, David Parker, James Phelan, D.D. Raphael, Leona Taker, Tzachi Zamir, and others, is that both literature and ethics concern human beings and their often conflicting actions, decisions, intentions, and aspirations (see Eskin, "Literature" 585; Parker 38). Humanists often claim that literature, especially novels, can change the set of values, emotions, and beliefs of readers as well as their general attitude about the life that is worth living. Hence, these scholars hold that literature has an important educational, or didactic, role. In this respect, and in their broad conception of ethics as referring to the whole of human life, humanists tend to follow Aristotle's ethical theory.
Levinasians frequently criticize the humanist position for several reasons. First, they argue that humanists' disregard of contemporary theory suggests an outdated, naive, and politically reactionary attitude toward literature. Indeed, humanists often connect the rise of literary theory to the fall of ethical criticism (Parker 9; Nussbaum 21-22; Booth 4-7); they tend to reproach New Criticism, structuralism, and deconstruction (3) for sharing a false ideal of literary studies as purely formal or linguistic and of the literary critic as value-neutral and emotionally detached. Nevertheless, humanists are, in general, well-versed in contemporary theoretical trends and find them unsatisfactory in that they ignore ethics or reduce them to politics, semiotics, or abstract, vacuous otherness.
The second point, closely related to the first, is that many humanists neglect or underestimate the subtlety of literary form and technique. In particular, modern and postmodern narratives subvert previous conceptions of narration and representation, and undermine the unity that humanists ascribe to the literary work. (4) Humanists, so goes the argument, employ literature as an instrument for drawing moralistic lessons, thereby simplifying the complexity of the literary text and obliterating its uniqueness as a work of art. This neglect of literary form is connected to the mimetic presupposition of humanists, who relate to art as a mirror of reality. (5)
A third critique of ethical humanism is that it cannot take into account radical difference, heterogeneity, and incommensurability. Rather, it "self-evidently always either relies on or produces determinations" (Gibson 11). Gibson is right if by "determinations" he means a certain positive, or determinate, conception of ethics (providing answers to the question "how should a human being live?"). However, his evaluation of humanism is imprecise if he maintains that such a position inevitably entails intolerance to incommensurable values. For example, Nussbaum claims that one of the main contributions of literature to moral philosophy is that literature most acutely demonstrates the inherent ethical difficulty of having to choose between competing and irreconcilable commitments in the absence of a single, universal law. (6)
Most humanists share with Aristotle the contention that practical reason cannot he reduced to a system of predetermined laws, or to the Kantian purely rational good will. Nussbaum, for instance, emphasizes the priority of concrete perceptions for ethical judgment. She insists that context-embedded features (which are frequently new and unanticipated), particular (especially loving) relationships, and the emotions are all relevant to ethics, yet arc all treated as irrelevant, or even detrimental, to ethics by Kantians.
Contrary to the humanist position, some prominent Levinasian literary scholars argue that realistic representation in general, and in literary narratives in particular, is liable to reduce the otherness of the literary text into totalizing sameness. Therefore, Levinasians tend to concentrate on postmodern, anti-representational, or "writable" ("scriptible"; see Barthes 5) literary texts that resist unity and closure. Their objection to forms of art that are perceived as totalizing and excluding the residues of the mysterious and the inconceivable has clear Levinasian resonances.
In Totality and Infinity, Levinas illustrates the...
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