Ethics in Culture

Ethics in Culture
≥
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-André Alt · Aleida Assmann · Francis Claudon
Marcus Deufert · Wolfgang Matzat · Fritz Paul · Terence James Reed
Herta Schmid · Simone Winko · Bernhard Zimmermann
Theodore Ziolkowski
14
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

앪
앝 Printed on acid-free paper which falls within
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 Nün-
ning ; 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
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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 Hochschulge-
sellschaft (Giessen University/Alumni Society), the Erwin Stein Founda-
tion, and the Giessener Graduiertenzentrum Kulturwissenschaften (Gie-
ssen 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 consider-
able 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
VIII Table of Contents
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 hind-
sight, one might think that some kind of crisis management had taken
place, though the only truth we can rely on is the ineradicable heterogene-
ity 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 representa-
tions 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 hu-
man behavior that was even superior to the abstract argumentation of the
ethical discourse of philosophy, was also taken up by other influential
2 Herbert Grabes
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 Lit-
erary 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 men-
tioned poststructuralist position, in particular the then fashionable decon-
structionist 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 in-
sights of Emmanuel Levinas. This latter group includes Robert Eaglestone
(Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas), Andrew Gibson (Postmodernity, Eth-
ics 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-de-
construction” (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 trans-
lation (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 Eth-
ics, 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
Introduction 3
Levinson) and the like. It should not be forgotten, either, that the aes-
thetic 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 as-
pect 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, Lit-
erature, Theory: An Introductory Reader. What the new century brought with it
was an increasingly intense focus on particular authors and works in in-
vestigations of the relationship between ethics and literature. A start was
made by Christina Kotte in Ethical Dimensions in British Historiographic Meta-
fiction: 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 Moral-
ity and Moral Culture, Bernard T Adeney’s Strange Virtues: Ethics in a Multi-
cultural 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 dec-
ades, 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 investiga-
tions 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
4 Herbert Grabes
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. Ap-
proaching 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 dis-
seminated 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 com-
mon theme, there will inevitably be some degree of arbitrariness in their
disposition; nevertheless, an attempt has been made to distinguish be-
tween 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 lan-
guage to its limits, literature takes us to the level of the ultimate questions
of being human in the world,” ANGELA LOCATELLI in her essay “Litera-
ture’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 “mo-
rality of the imagination, i.e. the concept of empathy.” In the contempo-
rary 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 subjectiv-
ities. 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 exam-
ples 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 mean-
ing, it seemed in any case to be “quite risky to attribute to works of lit-
erature an actual ethical impact.” However, the dissemination of values is
Introduction 5
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 liter-
ary rhetoric of persuasion may well be more effective than moral preach-
ing. 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 better-
known 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 repre-
sentations some visions to concretize the ethical encounter, to bring the
discussion back from the beyond.” For this purpose, not only “transcen-
dental 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 rep-
resentations.” 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 Witt-
gensteinian 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 eth-
ics, 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
6 Herbert Grabes
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 cul-
ture” 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 de-
velop 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 nor-
matively weak approach” leads him to three concrete alternative sugges-
tions regarding the ethical in the experience of literature: the first is “re-
sponsive 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 read-
ers”; 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 omnis-
cient 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 Lit-
erature Valuable: Fictions of Meta-Memory and the Ethics of Remem-
bering” 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 remem-
bering should be construed as a self-reflexive one, confronting seemingly
mimetic representations of the past with the conditions of their creation.”
Introduction 7
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 extraordi-
nary way “call for participation in the process of projecting meaning” and
thereby “reinforce our awareness of the interpretative practices and con-
comitant 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 devel-
oping 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 twenti-
eth century), “Unprofitable Excursions”: On the Ethics of Empathy in
Modernist Discourses on Art and Literature,” stresses the concept’s inter-
medial, and distinctly Modern, roots. Drawing parallels between the cri-
tique 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 sym-
pathy 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 Postmod-
ern 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 rela-
tionship of texts to concrete, biographically embedded subjects and to the
wider context of the inter-subjective life-world.” He finds that “the fol-
lowing points have found special attention: (1) the ways in which the nar-
rative mode is necessary to provide a medium for the concrete exemplifi-
cation 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 fic-
tional texts provides a forum for the enactment of the dialogical interde-
pendence 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 ques-
tions,” is interpreted in some detail; What I Loved is particularly well
pitched to make readers aware of the kind of ethical stance Martha Nuss-
baum has called “Love’s Knowledge”; a novel about art as a medium, it is,
8 Herbert Grabes
“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 cogni-
tive 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 narra-
tive text and possible effects that these may have on the reader’s mind.”
Literary figures can influence our own ethical model (as a “subjective the-
ory 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 “dissocia-
tion 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 in-
quiries have revealed is the fact that “blending, i.e., the use of metaphori-
cal constructions, is […] central to any act of cognition. And to keep our
mental apparatus in optimal shape is […] not merely a matter of aesthet-
ics, 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
Introduction 9
architecture’ became an integral part of the imperial project in the nine-

teenth 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 Indo-
Saracenic 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 contrib-
ute to an understanding of the ethical function of architecture?” leads to
the suggestion that it is “the reception-oriented idea of an “ethical experi-
ence.”
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. Meta-
phors 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 meta-
phors of empire, which consist not only in conceptualizing and legitimiz-
ing 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
10 Herbert Grabes
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 sur-
prising 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 ques-
tion 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 Ethi-
cal,” MAX SAUNDERS explores “a kind of literature [...] which sets its face
against value-judgements.” What he understands by “literary Impression-
ism” 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 “re-
sistance 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”; em-
ploying arguments put forward by Lawrence and Ford, Saunders demon-
strates 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 Mod-
ern 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 po-
etry has a moral aspect and Shelley’s romantic view that a “creative imagi-
nation is an essential precondition of moral judgement and sensibility,”
she draws attention to the fact that the “romantic concepts of intensity
Introduction 11
and poetic imagination deliberately cross the boundaries between the ethi-
cal and aesthetic dimensions of the reader’s mental response and cogni-
tion.” 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 ethi-
cal 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 ab-
sence.”
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 phi-
losophy 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 some-
times conflicting moral principles to specific contexts,” and in the “par-
ticipative 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 ma-
nipulate 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 high-
lighting 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 struc-
ture 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 nov-
elistic forms to represent trauma.” Beyond this mimetic aspect there is at
12 Herbert Grabes
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 possi-
ble 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 sympa-
thy,” 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 nov-
els 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 innova-
tive use of modernist and realist narrative technique with a “realist evoca-
tion of sympathy with life-like characters” leads to an “ethically viable
aesthetic.”
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Introduction 13
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14 Herbert Grabes
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Introduction 15
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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 play-
ful allusion to Nietzsche wished to imply that I would explore some of the
ways in which “figures and interests” are intrinsically and invariably con-
nected 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 na-
1
tionalisms in nineteenth-century Europe. The “canon debate” has re-
cently demonstrated that literature still remains a foundation of power struc-
tures, in support of ethnic, sexual and other minorities, and in the defi-
nition 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.’”
20 Angela Locatelli
2
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 single-
minded 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 indi-
viduals and among “interpretive communities,” makes it a value in itself,
whether we think of literature as a means for the immediate, and “mi-
metic” 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 informa-
tion (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 me-
diation in the transmission of cultural value(s) at two levels: first through a
historical contextualization (focusing on the changing rhetoric of litera-
ture’s moral purpose), and then, I will examine some aspects of the con-
temporary critical debate.
_____________
2 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.
3 Shakespeare is paradigmatic in this respect. See Pujante and Hoenselaars.
4 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: Im-
posture?”, and Locatelli and Kahn “Preface” to the Issue Teaching Literature.
Literature’s Versions of Its Own Transmission of Values 21
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 per-
spective 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 pro-
duce morally effective literature. Shelley’s argument reminds us that ap-
propriate indoctrination and/or pious intentions are not the most desir-
able 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 ma-
terial, but explicit and prescriptive works are usually soon dismissed, after
the cause celèbre for which they were written has met with a political re-
sponse 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 trans-
formed 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 be-
lieve that linguistic tensions and aesthetic sophistication promote the vi-
22 Angela Locatelli
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 pro-
moted 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 figural-
5
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 iudge-
ment 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.’”
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, reli-
gious 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 sanc-
tioned, 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 at-
tacks 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 valu-
able philosophical contribution and an important cultural document. His
24 Angela Locatelli
irony in defending Comedies and Tragedies against bigotry is also truly

enjoyable today, and, I venture to suggest, applicable to current censor-
ship situations (I am thinking, for example of the current censorship de-
bate 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 Romanti-
cism, 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 litera-
ture 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 unappre-
hended 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 associ-
ated, rather than set in opposition to each other. Poetry is, however, an-
other 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
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 Nuss-
baum’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 Liter-
aria 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 al-
ternative 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 elabora-
tion of such perspective. The Birth Of Tragedy From The Spirit Of Music, while
actually suggesting that “art owes its continuous evolution to the Apol-
lonian-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 prefer-
ence for truth in a “restricted sense”:
[Man] longs for the pleasant, life-preserving consequences of truth; he is indiffer-
ent 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 This view is not distant from the Russian Formalists’ insistence on the defamiliarizing
effect of literature.
7 I am thinking in particular of “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-moral Sense.”
26 Angela Locatelli
mans, differently from the Greek hero, (want to) deceive themselves, and
even more so when they hide the arbitrariness of what they have conven-
tionally 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 termi-
nology 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 substitu-
tions,” “reversals of names” in language are exposed as versions of a self-
interested truth. However, we can find a pars construens in this apparently
destruens philosophy: it is precisely the acute sense of “arbitrary transfer-
ences” intrinsically at work in language that provides a theoretical justifi-
cation for the ludic energy of art. On this ground, the awareness of make-
believe and the gesture of self-expression inevitably merge, while sponta-
neity, lightness, exuberance, excess, and transgression can be posited as
values, both ethical and aesthetic. This also subverts the view that art (fic-
tion) is a lie, while philosophy is “truth,” and invites a “poetic” and self-
consciously 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
“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-aca-
demic 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 “Postmod-
ernism, or the Cultural Logic,” “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”).
By suggesting that there are “founding” texts in each and every commu-
nity, 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 perspec-
tive 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 indispensa-
ble), 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-
28 Angela Locatelli
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.” New-
man 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 posi-
tion and interests, and to shared views (which does not mean shared inter-
ests, 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 dy-
namic 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 imagin-
ing 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 Newman 1955 cit. in Scholes 728.
9 I suppose that here Scholes under the term “our existence” means “our profession,” but
the lexical ambiguity is indeed a bit disquieting.
10 Scholes goes on to say: “[…] we can help those who study with us learn to read and inter-
pret 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.).
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 categoriza-
tion). 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 compas-
sion, refusals from which none of us is free. Many of the stories we tell one an-
other encourage the refusal of compassion, so not even the literary imagination
itself is free from blame […] practical politics […] frequently does seem impervi-
ous 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 representa-
tions are susceptible of becoming a source of vicarious experience, how
exactly does the literary experience become moral experience? His conclu-
sion is that literature goes beyond the immediate phenomenological ex-
periencing, 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 sug-
gests that in being susceptible to interpretation, and to a sophisticated
plurality of readings, literature is not like a videogame, even when enter-
taining, 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 trans-
mitted 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.
30 Angela Locatelli
videogame can certainly be enjoyable, and improve one’s immediate reac-

tive 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 litera-
ture, 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 subjec-
tivity 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 inevita-
bly 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 cul-
turally representative and unique. They belong to both a subjective knowl-
edge 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 See Locatelli “‘For Nothing Was Simply one Thing.’”
13 See also Lecercle.
Without falling into the trap of a narrowly content-based and merely

instrumental evaluation of literature (which is the prevalent trick of cen-
sorship, 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 sugges-
tion that reading can be “an attempt to respond to the otherness, inven-
tiveness, and singularity of the work” (79); and that as far as literary read-
ing is concerned, “mechanical and instrumental interpretation is com-
plicated 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.”
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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 Ger-
man 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 metaphysi-
cal 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.
36 Herbert Grabes
source of examples and an educational medium for moral behavior. De-

spairing 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 prin-
ciple, 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 situ-
ational ethics and aesthetics rest on the same foundation, acute observa-
tion. 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 Re-
sponsible” 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, con-
crete, 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 synthe-
sizing 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”:
Open, Less Open, and Hidden Dissemination of Values in English Literature 37
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 writ-
ten 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 founda-
tion 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 au-
thenticity.
In such a context, literary narrative assumes greater importance, be-
cause 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 dissemi-
nated study Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989) largely draws on the in-
terpretation 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
38 Herbert Grabes
like fictionality, aesthetic quality or literariness play no role in his argu-

ment. 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 an-
other 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 small-
scale 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 al-
lied 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 lib-
eral 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 con-
ceptions 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 posi-
tion 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 im-
perative imposed on us by the face of the other person, a responsibility
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 anthropo-
logical given. Moral rules would only reduce our sense of personal respon-
sibility, because “moral decisions, unlike abstract ethical principles, are
ambivalent” (Baumann 32). In order to be able to act responsibly in re-
gard to the other person, we have to be open-minded and ready to toler-
ate 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 re-
spect 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 epis-
temological 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 experi-
ence of alterity” (Grabes, “Ethics, Aesthetics, and Alterity” 23), I pointed
_____________
2 See his Ethics and Infinity (1985).
3 “An Ethics Founded on Textuality: J. Hillis Miller’s Ethical Criticism.”
40 Herbert Grabes
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 be-
tween 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 multi-
plicity 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, lis-
tener, 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 pos-
sible ethical effect have yet to be gauged.
There have also been various attempts to show that postmodern fic-
tion, 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 insist-
ing 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 as-
signed, 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.”
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 his-
torical 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 philoso-
phical 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 other-
wise 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 over-
lap. 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 ethi-
cal stance, their procedure belongs to the field of hidden influence, an
indirect ethical impact of which we will hear more. What Krause concen-
trates 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 litera-
ture 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 “ethi-
cal purposes literature may perform” are: (i) “responsive dialogue. The
reader responds to an unheard of and singular literary experience”; (ii)
42 Herbert Grabes
“the mnemonic and historical responsiveness of literature”, which permits

us to “enter into a dialogue with the forgotten”; and (iii) “responsive self-
contemplation,” 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 con-
struction 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 conse-
quence to us whether or to what degree literature can contribute to mak-
ing 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, some-
thing that is hardly in dispute.
In theory, there is considerable potential for conflict between the ethi-
cal 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 auton-
omy.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 qualifica-
tion. How else can one account for the popularity of moral personifica-
tion and allegory in medieval times or of satire well into the eighteenth
century? The reaction to the extent to which literary works openly dis-
seminate values, especially moral values, must have changed considerably
since the eighteenth century, and it is only since then that so-called didac-
tic 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, how-
ever, 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.”
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 moral-
ity 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 reac-
tions 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 com-
munication of some moral value or other cannot be the same as estab-
lishing a whole plane of moral signification.6
Of course, the genre of allegory was not in any need of allegorical in-
terpretation, 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.
44 Herbert Grabes
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 Uto-
pian 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 cen-
tury, 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 collec-
tion The Orators, in Stephen Spender’s Marxist program-poem “Not pal-
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 lit-
erature.
To begin at the very beginning, what else should motivate the pro-
tagonist of the eighteenth-century heroic epic Beowulf to perform danger-
ous 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 six-
teenth 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 “Courte-
sie,” 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 force-
fully depicts dangerous enemies like Despair, Slander, Care, Envy, De-
traction, 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 ef-
fect 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-
46 Herbert Grabes
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 re-
venge; 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 discrep-
ancy 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 al-
ready advertised in the title, and the sentiments of the heroine as ex-
pressed in the letters to her parents may appear naive, yet to most con-
temporary readers they seemed sincere. Fielding and some others sus-
pected, 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 Bel-
laston and hypocrites like Square or Thwackum on the one hand and on
the other good-natured characters like Tom or Allworthy or Sophia West-
ern 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
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 Posses-
sion 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 Ro-
mantic period. Yet from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Words-
worth’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-
48 Herbert Grabes
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 Looking-
Glass? 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 else-
where,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 In-
digo, 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 re-
cent works induce us to pay more attention to even more subtle differ-
ences. 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 forbid-
den.
_____________
7 See Grabes, “Timely or Out of Joint? Transformations of the Aesthetic and Cultural
Change.”
References
Baumann, Zygmunt. Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.
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 Al-
fred 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 Varia-
tion: 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. 79-
90.
—: “Timely or Out of Joint? Transformations of the Aesthetic and Cul-
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Function of Literature. Festschrift für Winfried Fluck zum 60. Geburtstag.
Eds. Thomas Claviez, Ulla Haselstein, and Sieglinde Lemke. Hei-
delberg: 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 Enlight-
enment. Trans. Lewis White Beck. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merril,
1959.
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.
50 Herbert Grabes
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
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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,
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Pope, Alexander. “An Essay on Man.” The Poems of Alexander Pope. Ed.
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Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
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Schwerdtfeger, Barbara. Ethics in Postmodern Fiction: Donald Barthelme and
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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 beauti-
ful, 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
52 Marshall Brown
never pay attention to ethics, you are liable to slide down the scale. Air-
time 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 Emman-
uel Lévinas, the guru of the moment in academic discussions of ethics.1
Ethics, for Lévinas, is the irreducible terrain where self meets Other. Rec-
ognition, 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-than-
total, 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 pragma-
tism of politics with a utopian pacifism.
Lévinas claims to replace the Kantian moral imperative with a Carte-
sian 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 indi-
vidual 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 pos-
ing, 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 condi-
tions 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 conscious-
ness 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 Emmanuel Lévinas, “Visage et éthique.” Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité; “Le visage.”
Ethique et infini: Dialogues avec Philippe Nemo.
2 “It is this ethical relation that Levinas describes, principally in Totality and Infinity, as meta-
physical” (Critchley 10).
3 All unattributed translations are my own.
Transcendental Ethics, Vertical Ethics, and Horizontal Ethics 53
virtú. Yet Lévinas offers little by way of a beachhead in daily life. Regula-
tive 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 rec-
ognition 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 en-
counter, to bring the discussion back from the beyond.
Consequently, my real concern is not with Lévinasian transcendental-
ism, but with a certain more terrestrial absolute. Tipped on its side, the
transcendental demand becomes the imperial encounter. The non-identi-
cal 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 indi-
vidual 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 transcen-
dent, 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,
54 Marshall Brown
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 men-
tality, 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 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 post-
structural 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 Mani-
chean 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 fu-
ture (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 Mo-
hamed’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.
5 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
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 oce-
anic 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 in-
cludes his “old and crazy” dog, two cats, and, in the barnyard, a dozen
goats (Defoe 157). But eventually he descends to a beach where, dramati-
cally, he encounters a single footprint. The isolated trace is the mark of
the Other, and far more uncanny for being single. In the popular imagina-
tion, 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 subse-
quently 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 sen-
tences 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 ser-
vant in what Mary Louise Pratt calls the “monarch-of-all-I-survey sce-
nario” 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 point-
edly 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 dia-
logue.
If transcendental ethical responsibility requires merely a face (or ab-
stract 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 de-
fense of Said’s devotion to Auerbach, see Apter 41-81.
56 Marshall Brown
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 so-
cialization 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 appro-
priation 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 indi-
viduality 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 ab-
stractions rather than the very material of ethics. On the last point, Ha-
bermas 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 understand-
ing 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 per-
fectly 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 in-
creasingly 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:
Learning the language and learning what and how the world is are bound to-
gether. 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 be-
cause 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 mis-
leadingly 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 dis-
tinctly 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 be-
comes 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 mis-
lead 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 Ortho-
dox 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 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 pro-
verbial association Bernstein’s example phrase is bound to mystify. No better instance
could be given of the routine unportability of cultural assumptions.
7 See Arac for a recent, language-focused reflection and proposal.
8 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-
58 Marshall Brown
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 lan-
guage” 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 essen-
tial 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 over-
looking Tom-All-Alone’s. Indeed, local failings are often masked or ex-
cused 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, chil-
dren, parents, neighbors. You enter another room—or, more prototypi-
cally, you ascend or descend a floor—and others are living with different
_____________
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.
9 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.”
10 In “Multum,” n. 5, I mention the case of a character who doesn’t even understand songs in
her native dialect.
11 Giovanni della Casa, Galateo, quoted in Weinrich 125. The lesser ethics are the subject of
most of the other essays in this collection.
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, Haber-
mas 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 em-
beddedness as well.
Transcendental and horizontal ethics are for big thinkers with big
ideas. Reach for the stars. Vertical ethics are for casuists. General princi-
ples 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 representa-
tion. 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 con-
stitute 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 do-
mestic ethics.
_____________
12 Agnes Heller’s strange tract, Das Alltagsleben: Versuch einer Erklärung der individuellen Reproduk-
tion, likewise presumes the social constitution of individual experience, leading (in her
analysis) to a rigorous tendency toward suppressing particularity. The book’s longest sec-
tion (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 uninforma-
tive 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.
60 Marshall Brown
Some of our neighbors and housemates, after all, are very trouble-
some. 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 Roch-
ester with “the continued outbreaks of her violent and unreasonable tem-
per” (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 construct-
ed. 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 combusti-
bility of even local problems, the occlusion of otherness within the mono-
lingual 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 redemp-
tion 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 com-
promises 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
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 para-
noid, 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 excep-
tional, 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 fam-
ily 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 once-
loved, 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 ethi-
cal “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 no-
tion 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 or-
der to install more locally sensitive behavior and judgment.
62 Marshall Brown
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 (Bork-
man 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 oxymo-
ron: 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 self-
evidently 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 execution-
ers, 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 im-
personal subverts the interpersonal; the uninterpretable call of the unpar-
donable 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.
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 neigh-
bors 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 stair-
case 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 fa-
talistic 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 Rou-
gon-Macquart series, Le Docteur Pascal, compensates with a redemptive
vitalism. The novel is doctrinaire, prolix, and over-generalized, but it en-
courages reading its predecessors against their surface grain.
The staircases in the various dwellings inhabited by Gervaise Mac-
quart in her journey from prosperity to prostitution reflect the morals of
the inhabitants. They are broadly symbolic – clean or dirty as are the bod-
ies and minds of those who use them. The author in general and this
novel in particular are famous for this kind of “realistic,” metonymic sym-
bolism. But the novel’s numerous staircases are also allegorical: they are
sites of staged interactions. (Symbolism, with its translucence of the eter-
nal 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 perspec-
tive 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 stair-
cases raise related complexes of interpersonal encounter.
64 Marshall Brown
limited allegories, as I shall be illustrating.) Here, for instance, is the wed-

ding 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 re-
curs 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 Ger-
vaise and the others tumble is a figure of speech, and their fall into abjec-
tion, 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 de-
scents 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. Ger-
vaise visits her husband Coupeau, confined to a hospital in terminal alco-
holic 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
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 indi-
viduals together in ethical encounter. Steps make all the difference: that is,
nuances rather than fields. A step gives moral elevation to the crucial en-
counter 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 back-
ward.”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 circum-
vent. 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 to-
ward 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.”
66 Marshall Brown
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 fol-
lowed 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, sym-
bolizing 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 ver-
ticals 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 ap-
pears 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 in-
creased external decency of the people and claim that with this polishing of man-
ners 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 charac-
ter by treating both natives and foreigners not with coarseness or scornful conde-
scension 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”?
Hoffmann’s cousin, after all, does most of the talking. Impressively ar-
ticulate, he hardly seems to need an amanuensis, let alone a ghost-writer.
But the distribution of roles here is allegorical rather than realistic, signi-
fying rather than causally motivated. Only the man whose proper medium
is language—not the one (however adept of tongue) whose proper me-
dium 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 lan-
guage 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 nar-
rator 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 ac-
knowledged 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 eventu-
ally revealed—sexual partner of the narrator’s ego ideal, Robert de Saint-
68 Marshall Brown
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 be-
neath 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 under-
ground […] 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 sub-
sequent 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 abo-
lition 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 Other-
ness” (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 ethi-
cal 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-
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 collec-
tivity is the wrong way to begin. “Collective dialectic” is in fact an oxymo-
ron, 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 Marx-
ism 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 demar-
cated 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 intangi-
bles 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 in-
deed, 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 mo-
ments, another dimension transpires through our reality” (128). Finally,
that is, class too stands in here for all uneven developments, all relation-
ships 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
70 Marshall Brown
the most intimate, most fragile encounters. The newly transpiring dimen-
sion is a realm not of symbolic greatness but of the infinitely small, per-
haps a kind of transcendence from below. Such a vertical ethics—herme-
neutic, 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.
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_____________
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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 trans-
lated 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 system-
atic 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 ex-
ample of the power of language. In other words, it may be that Wittgen-
stein’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, Witt-
genstein’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
74 Ronald Shusterman
(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 prob-
lem, of course, is that Wittgenstein himself is formulating his own meta-
propositions, 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 eth-
ics in culture. In this paper I hope to use a quick review of some Wittgen-
steinian 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 trans-
lation 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-
Agrammaticality, Silence and the Diffusion of Values: The Holiday of Language 75
guage of information, is not used in the language-game of giving informa-

tion” (Zettel, § 160).1 So how does one transcend this apparent contradic-
tion? 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 nev-
ertheless 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 phi-
losophy 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 sys-
tem 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 de-
scribe 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; be-
cause 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, im-
plicit 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 Witt-
genstein. One major article was called “‘The Investigations’ Everyday Aes-
thetics 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 Wittgenstein quoted in Gibson 109.
2 Cavell’s article is reprinted in Gibson & Huemer 21-33.
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 ab-
sence 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 be-
cause 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 de-
velops the notion of “significant absence”—that is, the philosophical im-
port 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 distin-
guishing 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-
take”—a concept that will allow me to develop an esthetics of agrammati-

cality. 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 cate-
gories 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 classifica-
tion and translation. To remind you briefly, Quine imagines an anthro-
pologist 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 note-
book “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
conceives of the artwork as crossing boundaries, disrupting categories and

moving in unforeseen directions, simply for the sake of the alterity in-
volved.
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, Ber-
nard 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 aes-
thetics. 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 phi-
losophical dimension in its relentless deconstruction of familiar categories.
Grammar needs to persuade us that categories are solid; art wants to sub-
vert 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 cate-
gory 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 confu-
sion 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.
of the category mistake. It is agrammatical, rhizomatic and indeed “zeug-

matic” 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 agrammati-
cal 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 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.
5 For a more detailed treatment, see Ronald Shusterman, “Les Delvoye, Duchamp, et ‘autres’
Kapoor: pour une théorie agrammaticale de l’art.”
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 oth-
ers 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 con-
cepts. 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
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 sig-
nificant 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 im-
plicit. 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 accus-
tomed to his wife’s little mistakes with language” (Ackroyd 73). Here we
have, just two pages after the introduction of the characters, a clear indi-
cation 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 metaethi-
cal effect, the greatest movement towards reciprocal solidarity, in short,
the most powerful presence of ethics in culture, will come in those exam-
ples where I have to work to understand. For the obvious pun can slide by
me unawares, whereas the difficult one, the truly significant mistake, in-
volves 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 auto-
matically …” (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.
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 informa-
tion 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 verita-
ble 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 mis-
take 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 rep-
resentation 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 intention-
ally 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.
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 plu-
ralist 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 ver-
sion of Finnegans Wake that I had downloaded from the web. The hard-
drive churned for a few moments before blurting out the following pro-
test: “There are too many errors in this document” and it stopped dis-
playing 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 life-
time learning to speak Joyce’s tongue. The errors here are a call to unlim-
ited (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 berma-
nend thing. Id won’d be the zame, ever again. (199)
After a few moments, however, even the unwitting reader (that is a chari-
table 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-
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 theo-
retically 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 identifi-
cation. 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 interre-
lated 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).
6. Interpretation and Free Will
A number of pages of Culture and Value are devoted to religion, and nota-
bly to the question of predestination and free will.9 I think that the pres-
ence of such remarks, in a series of notes that also ramble on about lit-
erature 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 incomprehen-
sible 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 in-
deed 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 con-
sciousness 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 See, for example, Culture and Value 80-81 e.
10 There are various versions of this anecdote, with slight modifications of the text.
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. 109-
124.
Gibson, John, and Wolfgang Huemer, eds. The Literary Wittgenstein. Lon-
don: 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 Sto-
ries. 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): 201-
217.
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, self-
determination 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 deon-
tological 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 con-
tinue 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 Aris-
totelian 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 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).
2 The central works I am referring to are, of course: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics and Kant,
Kritik der praktischen Vernunft.
3 Aristotle and Kant have both drawn up elaborate virtue tables.
4 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.
5 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.
88 Philipp Wolf
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 emo-
tive 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 exem-
plary 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 em-
pathize 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 funda-
mental 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 solip-
sism. 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 ef-
fect: “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 Ed-
mund (King Lear) are similarly intriguing figures. And if we look at ro-
mantic, post-romantic or modernist poems, many of them seem to cele-
_____________
6 A more comprehensive study of this question with alternative suggestion will appear in
book form in 2008.
7 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.
8 William Shakespeare, King Richard III III, 1, 191-93.
Beyond Virtue and Duty: Literary Ethics as Answerability 89
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 Aristo-
telian 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 (argua-
bly) Richard Rorty, seem to take for granted. One privileges an ontologi-
cally-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 char-
ity 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 litera-
ture is based on a humanist concept of literary communication and recep-
tion 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 idealis-
tic presupposition. We may very well receive certain emotional impres-
sions 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 For evil as a prolific aesthetic principle see Bohrer, “Das Böse” 459-73.
10 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 primar-
ily focus on some of their arguments. For a concise overview, see Antor, “Ethical Criti-
cism” 163-165.
90 Philipp Wolf
well remain dumb and the reader quite happy with an indistinct feeling of
viciousness. Apart from a quite unethical fascination with morally un-
bound acts, the very materiality of the text, the sound and rhythm, the
intensity or strangeness of the imagery may utterly divert me from engag-
ing 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 col-
league 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 epistemologi-
cal 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 ex-
perience 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 meta-
phorical 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 aes-
theticist 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 be-
havior. 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
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 mo-
tivational 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 out-
side. Emotions such as pity, fear, disgust, involve, to be sure, some cogni-
tive significance as they make us adopt evaluative stances in the first in-
stance. 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 judg-
ment and hence, according to Nussbaum “ethical information” (Nuss-
baum 65). But does this information also discriminate between appropri-
ate or inappropriate, plausible or implausible? Kant, as it is well known,
does not accept emotions as a basis for ethical acts. Pity doesn’t distin-
guish 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 Emo-
tions prove rather unreliable in terms of ethical significance and may cog-
nitively supply us with completely inadequate prejudices. What we need,
then, is a discriminating second perspective, which can link us with gener-
ally 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 “for-
mal structures” (76). Our identificational reading experience is also medi-
ated 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 For an aesthetics of (ethical) negativity, see Bohrer, “Die Negativität des Poetischen” 1-14.
12 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.
92 Philipp Wolf
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 possi-
ble 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 con-
fronts 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 as-
sume 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 intro-
ductory 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 Mar-
shall 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).
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 ethi-
cal criticism, fails to convince since it is begging the question. One self-
evidently 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 cul-
ture. Morality has indeed become “contingent” in our self-reflexive mod-
ernity. There is, on the one hand, psychology (or, more recently, neurol-
ogy) 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 judg-
ments 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 won-
der about motives for and reactions to actions, about socio-cultural con-
ditions 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 sup-
posed 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.
94 Philipp Wolf
for the persons in the novel and the (implied) reader, they are not men-
tioned 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 way-
wardness” 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 inconsiderate-
ness 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 soci-
ety. (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 psycho-
therapist 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 judg-
ments. 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 open-
ness, 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.
A related basic problem with normative claims without a particular in-

stitutional frame is, of course, also the addressee: Whom do I want to
reach, whom can I reach and who wants to be reached? Which rationally-
instrumental Wall Street economist can be convinced to read Hard Times
for the sake of her humane improvement? I guess recommending litera-
ture and even a particular canon of works (as Nussbaum does) as an ethi-
cally 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 consid-

erations 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 phi-
losophical disciplines appear to be better off without it. However, we
cannot leave it at that. Literature would be as insignificant and inconse-
quential as any form of entertainment from pop songs to boxing. Reading
literature exclusively for its complexity, semantic wealth or mimetic func-
tion 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 acknowledg-
ment, 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 stu-
dents. 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 rais-
ing ethical questions.
_____________
15 See Oates.
96 Philipp Wolf
I think we can still comply with the demand for orientation if we ac-
knowledge that literature allows for practically relevant forms of knowl-
edge 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 re-
sponsiveness. 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 assump-
tions, 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 appropri-
ate 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 mor-
ally 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 sophisti-
cated reader has gone through Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral de-
velopment, 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.
K. Appropriateness is, to be sure, a literary category, since the entertain-

ment value of literary works depends not least on codes such as appropri-
ate/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 willing-
ness to participate is hardly conceivable without an intention to under-
stand 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 my-
self 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 ex-
pectations may even be counter-productive. They remain without conse-
quences.
The solution to this can only be a methodical and systematic restric-
tion 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 re-
quire 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 concrete-
ness of linguistic forms and descriptions as well as characters, acts or deci-
_____________
17 By literature I here mean texts that are not predominantly written to please by fulfilling the
stereotypical expectations a certain reading public may cherish.
18 See Habermas esp. 99.
98 Philipp Wolf
sions that appear (at least initially) normatively unbound and incompre-
hensible. 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 indis-
pensable 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 con-
scious and/or sensitive subject whosoever, will not only arouse our inter-
est 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 nei-
ther 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 eth-
ics (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 discrepan-
cies 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 possi-
bility 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 “de-
familiarization,” 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 mo-
rality or an “age after value.”
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 medi-
ating 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 sus-
picion 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 al-
ways 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 ad-
vantage 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 start-
ing 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 incli-
nation 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
100 Philipp Wolf
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 trouble-
free communication between textual agents and reader. Following no pre-
established rule, it eschews the occupation and appropriation of the con-
tent 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 open-
ness, 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 differ-
ent from the accustomed, yet it cannot be deduced from it nor subsumed
to the general. The heterological experience surmounts meaning “where-
upon 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 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.
21 Adorno’s term is “Erkenntnis des Nichtidentischen”; see Adorno 140.
22 Lévinas’s ethics, his “altogether Other” is still conceived of in theological terms, one
should note.
23 Waldenfels uses the German noun “Anspruch” which can mean claim, right, demand as
well as appeal.
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 re-
spect 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 sto-
ries 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 inevi-
tability or “ne-cessitudo” (Waldenfels 63), a claim “which likewise does not
fall under the disjunction of facts and norms, is and ought [‘Sein und Sol-
len’].” 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 Ar-
row 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 pro-
vocation 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.
102 Philipp Wolf
(Murphy 83) stir us up, inciting our moral complacency (the latter espe-
cially with respect to animals). One might also mention Beckett’s novels as
well as the many literary beings and implied narrators that refuse commu-
nicative consent. The asymmetry between text, context and recipient
points to an ethical predicament, provoking perhaps communicative ac-
tion and opens up a possible ethical horizon.
3. Three Suggestions
Having the non-referential, event-like and pro-vocative character of lit-

erature 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 re-
sponds 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, con-
versations 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 read-
ers. Precisely through its fictional openness, or plurivocal non-referential-
ity, it may give a present face and a voice to all those who have been by-
passed 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 re-
member 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 precondi-
tion for sorting out one’s attitude towards and position within our human
and non-human environment. We enter into a dialogue with ourselves vis-
à-vis our environment in its dumb and mute, and hence pro-vocative, pres-
ence; what remains is the recognition together with the acknowledgement
of something else in its necessity. On account of the interplay of the aes-

thetic and the ethic, of literary self-reference and extraneous reference, I
would even go to the point of claiming that structural elements, the énon-
ciation, 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 petit-
bourgeois 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 envi-
ronment.
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 (pre-
sumably 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
104 Philipp Wolf
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’” (Dis-
grace 69). And a little further down he deplores, for example, that his “at-
tractive” (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 hap-
pens. Three black men savagely rape his daughter and devastate her prop-
erty. 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 crema-
tion, 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 atone-
ment, it is, and that is the crucial ethical point, without calculation. It hap-
pens to him and he accepts it; just as he unbendingly accepted his dis-
missal (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 be-
lieve Lurie simply wants to be somewhere else, uneasy about his university job, the institu-
tion 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 interpreta-
tion of compensatory morality is offered by the narrator in the context of the savage at-
tack: “So it has come, the day of testing” (Disgrace 94). I also find it difficult to see a “dae-
mon,” “drive or programme of self-destruction” to have taken possession of Lurie.
(Horstmann 132).
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 humil-
ity. 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.[…] Neverthe-
less, 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 be-
come 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 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).
27 See Plessner, “Ausdruck und menschliche Natur.”
28 Horstmann 137, see footnote 36.
106 Philipp Wolf
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 exis-
tence, 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 in-
appropriate, 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 col-
league 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 One should mention that Lurie himself is at first far from accepting the rape of his daugh-
ter (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.
30 On the other hand, one should not fail to notice Lurie’s complaint about the “puritanical
times” in contemporary South Africa (Disgrace 66).
makes him see acts of humility or atonement in a somewhat different

light.
Rather than the highly provocative text itself, which is open to inter-
pretation, it was the subsequent conversation, encouraged by the institu-
tion 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 lit-
erature 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: “Re-
member 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. (Memori-
als do not single out a particular victim, while still allowing or even en-
couraging individual reference.) We pay respect to a person whose exis-
tence 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 Holo-
caust, 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 illus-
trates 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-
108 Philipp Wolf
ity, since we cannot betray the perhaps final and vague, yet existential,
hope of the victims of Stalin, Hitler or Saddam Hussein, to be neverthe-
less 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 be-
fore, 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 de-
scribe it, retain it and bear witness for those who come later. Thus indi-
vidual 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 com-
mon 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 po-
etry,31 the historical novel and, more specifically, historiographic metafic-
tion, 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.
persons, merging actual figures and events with a fictional narrative.

Among the most successful examples are certainly Don DeLillo’s Under-
world (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 fac-
tual 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 so-
berly 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 sal-
vaging can only be performed if one avoids sentimentality, easy identifica-
tion, “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.
110 Philipp Wolf
Powers renders a lively, and according to all evidence, authentic pic-

ture 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 out-
look: “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 unbe-
lieving 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 nar-
ration 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 experi-
ence 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 re-
collection, 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 an-
other 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 sympa-
thetic way. But since this depiction takes place in an artistic medium, his
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 in-
animate 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 every-
day life we look upon it either with complete indifference or, instrumen-
tally, 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 to-
wards 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 stum-
ble. 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 “endo-
symbiosis 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 con-
tinue to insist on the categorical difference between humans (poet or not)
and their non-human environment. We simply do not have the percep-
tional 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 second-
order view, our life is determined by a “sense of ending” and we are lin-
guistic beings, but “what one speaks about, one does not have” (Novalis).
_____________
33 See Bate.
34 Thus Tony Pinkney in a well-informed overview of “Romantic Ecology”, here 413.
35 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.
36 Thus the title of a famous article by Thomas Nagel.
112 Philipp Wolf
Literary language, first of all, puts the intentional content of what it

describes in referential brackets, non-functional and a-causal as it is. Fur-
thermore, if it wants to be successful, it attempts at describing its envi-
ronment 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,” mos-
quitoes, bats or snakes are also anthropomorphic projections and he re-
peats 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” (Law-
rence 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 sympa-
thy, empathy and solidarity. There must be some common qualities, too,
features to bring the other being into the range of our feelings. We natu-
rally feel more for mammals, which may look into our eyes, than for in-
sects, 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 rela-
tions 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 black-
bird (“‘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.
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-evi-
dently intuitive and unquestioned manner, a manifestation of organic self-
reliance. 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 deter-
mines 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. In-
stead 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 ethi-
cally 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 re-
sponse 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 atti-
tude towards our environment.
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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 assump-
tions 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 Conver-
sation 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,” envi-
sions a meeting of the minds of authors and readers with a consequent
negotiation of moral values. Books which present “deliberate lies or de-
based visions” (Booth 42) should be avoided like bad company. Another
position which I do not hold, although there cannot be any doubt con-
cerning its deep significance, is Adam Zachary Newton’s concept of nar-
rative ethics which defines “narrative as ethics,” stressing “the ethical con-
sequences 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 Knowl-
edge; 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.”
118 Wolfgang G. Müller
“on the links among technique (the signals offered by the text) and the
reader’s cognitive understanding, emotional response, and ethical posi-
tioning” (Living to Tell 23). My approach is, however, generically broader
than Phelan’s who concentrates on I-narration—his term is character narra-
tion––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.”
An Ethical Narratology 119
characters of the novel. Blifil is categorized as an egotist, Tom as an altru-

ist. The characters are thus placed in a given system of moral values. Basi-
cally, 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 “dis-
honest” 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 under-
standing. 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, warm-
hearted, 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 divi-
sion 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”
tend to be affirmed by the narrator’s value-position. In so far the ortho-

dox 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 sim-
ple 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 per-
son 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 per-
sonal 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 perspec-
tive 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 arti-
ficial importance, by becoming Mrs. Charles Musgrove; but Anne, with an ele-
gance 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.
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 Wal-
ter’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-of-
view, 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 engage-
ment 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 narra-
tor claims only limited authority in questions of moral judgment, as for-
mulas 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 mat-
ters of marriage may be harmful, yet he couches his statements in a nega-
tive 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 con-
siderations of principle he believes irrelevant. What counts is the moral
foundation of life: “[…] if she [a woman] shall have recognized the neces-
sity 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 sympa-
thy 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 narra-
tive discourse. It speaks with two voices in a way which looks forward to
the amalgamation of authorial and figural narration in Henry James’s nov-
els. 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 narra-
tion, 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)
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 form-
ing 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 re-
flected […]” (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 fe-
male characters, moral criticism is tempered by a sympathetic representa-
tion of inner conflicts, there are no such sympathy-enhancing elements in
the representation of the men associated with them. The narrator’s distri-
bution 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 narra-

tor), which arose at the turn from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century
and was first extensively developed by Jane Austen, the narrator’s pres-
ence 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 fig-
ures), 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 protago-
nist for her tactless behavior towards Miss Bates. But as far as the act of
narration is concerned, overt moral comment is usually excluded in point-
of-view fiction, which makes it the reader’s task to decode the moral
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 dis-
tress. One the one hand, these sentences are, through their free indirect
form, marked stylistically in the narrative context. On the other, they ap-
pear 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 censori-
ous 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 conversa-
tion 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
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 im-
plies that an impression, resulting from an observation of such short du-
ration 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 protago-
nist, 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 stylis-
tic 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 subjec-
tification is to be noticed here. In the novel there is no other character
who feels and thinks like Fanny and nobody else, including Edmund Ber-
tram, knows her attitude to the occurrences in Mansfield Park. It is only
the reader who is granted to her inner self. The free indirect representa-
tion 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 func-
tion of free indirect style, to convey a moral norm which forms a counter-
balance 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-
tential in Fanny Price comes from the pen of Lionel Trilling.4 Other crit-
ics, 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 com-
ment on Michiel Heyns’s recent attempt to find elements of ironical sub-
version 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 indigna-
tion, 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 represen-
tation 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 protago-
nist and at the same time kept at distance. An example would be the rep-
resentation 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 undertak-
ing; 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 atti-
tudes 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––indi-
cates 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 The Opposing Self (1955).
5 Cf. Heyns.
mind thus coincides with a distance which has moral implications. The
second part of the quoted passage expresses through a number of adjec-
tives and adverbs (“interesting,” “certainly,” “very kind,” “highly becom-
ing”) Emma’s self-righteousness and conceitedness as an aspect of her
egocentricity. The stylistic form of the passage ironically subverts the em-
pathy 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 well-

worked area for critics dealing with the ethics of narrative. The reason for
this predilection may be that ethical problems tend to be strongly charac-
ter-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 self-
constitution, 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 Caul-
field, 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 re-
veals 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
who possesses extraordinary moral sensitivity. It is related to just this

character and could not have been uttered in its specific radicality by an-
other 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 conven-
tions. 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, recog-
nize 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 reflec-
tion:
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-
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 re-
mains intact in spite of all his doubts and self-incriminations. The depic-
tion of this mental crisis and moral confusion of a boy derives its authen-
ticity 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 omni-
scient narrator’s explanatory report of the processes in Huck’s conscious-
ness would not be adequate to the experiential nature of what the pro-
tagonist has to go through. And point-of-view narration would lack the
quality of voice and its authenticating force which is essential to first-per-
son 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 con-
struction 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 orienta-
tion 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-narra-
tion 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. Fur-
ther 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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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 at-
tempt 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 automati-
cally 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, eth-
ics 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 impor-
tant 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 aes-
thetic 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.
132 Birgit Neumann
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 sys-
tems, 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 val-
ues? 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 “pluri-
form 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 respon-
sible for someone or something to someone by an institutionalized or inter-
nalized 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 consid-
erable 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, femi-
nism, psychoanalysis and Marxism—“the conception of ethics as based on
universal moral principles was invariably denounced as heavily implicated
Fictions of Meta-Memory and Ethics of Remembering 133
in the metaphysical assumptions of the Enlightenment tradition and dis-

missed as a relic of ‘old’ humanism” (Kotte 62). Heidegger, Wittgenstein,
Lyotard, Foucault and Lacan consider the ethos an unjust and limiting reifi-
cation 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 judg-
ments 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 episte-
mology […], and—above all—with the Western Enlightenment meta-
narrative 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 accusa-
tion, 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 val-
ues 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 sim-
ply no standpoint from which one could possibly deny value without af-
firming 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 no-
tions 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 incommen-
surable 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.”
134 Birgit Neumann
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 de-
nying 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 judge-
ments, and their objectifications, interplay and transformations. (Fekete i)
Given that literary texts, alongside other artistic and non-artistic objectifi-
cations 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 ines-
capable. 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 ethi-
cally 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 our-
selves 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 “character-
istically presupposes a sociology” (22). The aspirations of ethics to univer-
sality are therefore an illusion.
Thus, if the definition of what is good and valuable is culturally con-
ditioned 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-
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 resist-
ing closure it engages us in an open process of negotiation and renegotia-
tion of different evaluations and induces us to question our own strategies
of sense-making as well as the norms that guide these strategies (cf. Shus-
terman 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 simplifica-
tion of experience.
Of course, there is no denying that literature expresses and stages ex-
plicit 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 emotion-
ally 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 ethi-
cal dimension of fiction is to be found in the very form of literary repre-
sentation: A literary text achieves ethical value through the ostensible in-
136 Birgit Neumann
terplay between content and the reflection on that content, which con-
comitantly 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 moti-
vated 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. Self-
reflexive literature cultivates our attention to different ways of meaning
making in the particular situation, an acute observation of different possi-
bilities. 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 config-
urable 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 in-
terpretations we make and the norms we endorse.
Ethics, therefore, should be conceived of as involving a self-reflexiv-
ity, “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 inter-
pretation. It could properly be described as a “metaethics” (Shusterman
29f.), that is, an ethics which displays the processes and forms of judg-
ment “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 in-
creases 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.
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 collec-
tive 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-inter-
preted according to present needs and interests. Thus, much of what we
“remember” is not an objective replica or mere description of past experi-
ences, but an actively designed construct fulfilling current needs for
meaning. Our memories are highly selective, and the rendering of memo-
ries 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 inten-
tional fashioning to a greater extent than do individual memories. There-
fore, 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 en-
tails 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 in-
timate that an ethics of remembering should be construed as a self-reflex-
ive one, confronting seemingly mimetic representations of the past with
138 Birgit Neumann
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 delu-
sion 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 pres-
ence,” 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 be-
tween 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 con-
structed makes memory both political and subject to debate, thus pre-
cluding 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 aes-
thetics therefore not only regulate the play of value, they are also pro-
duced by and out of it.
In what follows I want to propose that so-called metamnemonic nov-
els or fictions of meta-memory provide a model for what a literary ethics
of remembering could look like. Fictions of meta-memory combine per-
sonally 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
only present past events, but also reflect upon the possibilities of repre-
senting 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 rec-
ollect past experiences, but also by an ethical imperative to reflect on these
processes of recollection. Debunking mimetic conceptions of representa-
tions, such novels critically engage in questions of retrospective meaning-
making, 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 continu-
ally 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 narra-
tion. The “how” of remembering directly contradicts the logic of the
memory narrative at the expense of the mimetic illusion, thus demon-
strating 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 ul-
timately destabilize their own representations. The revelation of the con-
structed nature of memory does not offer evidence of the past’s insignifi-
cance; 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 self-
conscious 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.”
140 Birgit Neumann
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 Mi-
chael 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 bela-
boring 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 mem-
ory. Writing as a Japanese Canadian, Kogawa “marks the entry of racial
minority women’s fiction into the Canadian mainstream, challenging tra-
ditional 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 Cana-
dian 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 inter-
ment 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 in-
deed, the “how” of this fiction of meta-memory is intricate. The telling of
the past is not a simple, transparent process, but involves creating, con-
structing, reconstructing and challenging memories. The novel accentuates
the difficulty of knowing the past with any certainty. Memory and multi-
perspectivity 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 con-
flicted power relations, reflecting the entanglement of antagonistic memo-
ries 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.
At the beginning in particular, Obasan subordinates the question of

what constitutes the past to the essential question of how a highly trau-
matic past can be remembered and narrativized at all. The homodiegetic
narrator Naomi Nakane’s childhood memories during and after the Sec-
ond 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 an-
swers 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 anti-
racist 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 per-
suade 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 subjec-
tive and vivid picture of the narrator’s past experiences. Naomi’s memo-
ries are not concerned with historical facts but with her personal lived-
through experience. Her exploration does not pretend to be objective, or
142 Birgit Neumann
neutral: By foregrounding Naomi’s role as rememberer, the novel ac-

knowledges that her selection of stories is tied to her current needs. By
means of internal focalization she reactivates her childish ways of per-
ceiving, 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 swim-
ming-pools. The narrator thus consciously refrains from presenting the
past from the vantage point of her adult self and from providing explana-
tions which are based on her superior knowledge. To the extent that in-
ternal focalization elaborates on the subjective details of the past and al-
lows experiences of the very particular in their inner concreteness, it is a
narrative strategy particularly apt to highlight both the narrator’s emo-
tional involvement in the past and the subjective character of the narra-
tive.
This subjectivity is further is further emphasized by Obasan’s mon-
tage-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 ap-
proach 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 het-
erogeneity, of the recognition that there is something which is beyond the
realm of representation. As Lyotard has argued, stories which remain
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 incorpo-
rates a newspaper clipping which reports the situation of deported Japa-
nese Canadian field workers and which Emily has titled: “Facts about
evacuees in Alberta” (Obasan 193). The article honors the Japanese Cana-
dian 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 fore-
grounding 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 fea-
ture 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
144 Birgit Neumann
account and its exposed subjectivity, however, do not diminish its signifi-
cance 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 nego-
tiating “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 for-
gotten. 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 re-
member […]. You are your history” (Obasan 60). The meaning of memo-
ries may be forever troubled and troubling, but there is no denying the
importance of these memories. In its very structure, then, the novel per-
forms the paradoxical task of creating a meaningful past and simulta-
neously submitting this past to continuous evaluation. The intricate inter-
play 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 corre-
sponds 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 meta-
memory 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
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 refer-
ences 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 compet-
ing 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 recon-
struct 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. How-
ever, he repeatedly has to realize that what he finds are not authentic ver-
sions of the past, but only gossip, legends, myths and highly romanticized
memories. His relatives embellish their narrations with exorbitant exag-
gerations and ascribe mythical dimensions to everyday events. Disillu-
sioned, 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 Mi-
chael attempts to reconstruct the last, most dramatic train ride of his fa-
ther. 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 reli-
able due to its dubious sources and which is disclaimed with every con-
secutive narrative act. What remains of the past, therefore, is not a singu-
lar 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
146 Birgit Neumann
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-fac-
eted past which defies all attempts at resolving dissonance. Acknowledg-
ing that there is no single source of origin, the novel affirms internal dif-
ferences in a genealogy of dispersion (cf. Helms 65).
The fragility of memory foreshadows the disintegration of the narra-
tor’s own mnemonic narrative, that is, his autobiographical novel. Imag-
ining how his father is reading a novel and thus trying to establish a dia-
logue which he was always denied, Michael observes that “ants had
attacked the novel thrown on the floor by the commode. A whole battal-
ion 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 self-
reflexivity, the inadequacy of Michael’s memory version and the undevi-
ating incompatibility between the past reality and its reconstruction are
revealed. What remains of the past are not tenable facts, but mere frag-
ments 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 poly-
phonic and incoherent information mediated in Ondaatje’s autobiographi-
cal 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 mem-
ory 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 estab-
lished notions of memory and narrative have, indeed, been radically re-
defined. Whilst the documentary evidence has remained incomplete and in
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. Neverthe-
less, 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 under-
stand 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, re-
flects its mediation and turns out to be superior to any attempt at repre-
senting 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 persis-
tent 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 for-
getting 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-
148 Birgit Neumann
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 litera-
ture 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 tex-
tual 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-pragma-
tization literature induces us to conduct “endless […] autotelic interpreta-
tion” (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
of monopolistic cultural world-models (cf. Zapf). In this light, the resto-

ration 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” encour-
ages readers to re-evaluate the meaning of the past through the possibili-
ties 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 am-
bivalences 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 multiplic-
ity. 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 evalu-
ate 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 epistemo-
logical habits and require us to take responsibility for the ones we endorse.
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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 ter-

rorist attack of 9/11 on the Twin Towers in New York, the British novel-
ist 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 “empa-
thy”—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 feel-
ings 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 lead-
ing 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.
154 Simon Cooke
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 me-
dia 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 disengage-
ment) is expanded is itself insufficient to the task of promoting empathy.
The line of argument, from a literary perspective, derives its clearest in-
heritance from the Romantic defence of poetry (broadly conceived); and
McEwan’s words are very close in feeling to those of Percy Bysshe Shel-
ley’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 oth-
ers; 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 diffe-
rent 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.
“Unprofitable Excursions”: On the Ethics of Empathy in Modernist Discourses 155
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 lan-
guage; and, even more remarkably given the term’s service to champion-
ing literature over other media, it is a term which first appears in the con-
text 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 twentieth-
century 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 ques-
tion the currently prevailing ethics of empathy by emphasizing the inter-
medial, distinctly Modern roots of the concept itself, putting forward the
argument that “empathy” entered the English language as a visual-aes-
thetics term just as the concept itself came into crisis in the personal, so-
cial and cultural sense in which we use it today. Wilhelm Worringer’s Ab-
straction and Empathy (first published in German as Abstraktion und Ein-
fühlung in 1908) was an influential work that played a major role in propa-
gating discussions about abstraction and empathy in European Modernist
_____________
3 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 trivi-
alization 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.).
4 For more comprehensive histories of the concept, with psychoanalytic remit but more
widely traced lineage, see Wispé.
5 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 psycho-
logical response to other living (human) beings; the other eight, like Page/Lee’s and
Titchener’s, all concern aesthetic response, motor mimicry, or kinesthesia.
156 Simon Cooke
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 interper-
sonal terms and highlight the remarkable parallels with Worringer’s cri-
tique 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 re-
spond 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 Psychol-

ogy 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 prin-
cipally 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 aestheti-
cally 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 cul-
tural 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 re-
ferred to.
Despite the hint of skepticism in the reference to empathy’s operating
in “some mysterious manner,” Worringer broadly agreed with this diagno-
sis of the psychology of aesthetics at work in Western art. His main con-
cern, 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.
aesthetics Worringer found to be characteristic of “non-Western” or “Af-

rican 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 non-
Western, 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 preva-
lent 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 recognis-
ing 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 repre-
sents 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-Mod-
ernist Western aesthetics—Worringer takes a further step towards a di-
rectly 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 relation-
ship 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 im-
mense 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.
158 Simon Cooke
The urge to empathy, then, is aligned—in principle as well as in its cultu-

rally 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 Wor-
ringer’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 interpreta-
tion 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 Mod-
ernism in visual and literary (and indeed other) arts. Indeed, though Wor-
ringer 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 it-
self’ 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 resigna-
tion 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 Ab-
straction 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).
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 Wor-
ringer’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 liter-
ary, as well as visual, aesthetics was most definitively explored, however,
only later in Joseph Frank’s essay of 1945, “Spatial Form in Modern Lit-
erature,” in which Frank drew on Worringer’s text as evidence for the
thesis that Modernist classics represented “the exact complement in lit-
erature, 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 im-
portant 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 abstrac-
tion is linked to a contemptuous dread of fellow human beings, and in-
deed 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 bur-
geoning; 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 aes-
thetics 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 aes-
thetic object, rather than the capacity of one human being to empathize
with another. Exactly how the word transformed from a primarily aes-
_____________
9 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).
10 See Frank for a compilation of critiques, and Frank’s response.
160 Simon Cooke
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 confi-
dence 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 empa-
thetic 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 abstrac-
tion 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 un-
derstand today.
To call to mind only two of the relevant, well documented primary
contexts: At one level empathy was threatened by the increasing drift to-
wards the city, the increased pace of transportational and communica-
tional technologies, and the rise of private individualism and metropolitan
professionalism11—what sociologist Georg Simmel called, in “The Me-
tropolis 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, even-
tually, an “incapacity emerges to react to new sensations with the appro-
priate 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 assess-
ment 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 occa-
sions 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.”
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 substi-
tutes 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 under-
mine 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, how-
ever––from the most general terms in its “stream of consciousness” nar-
rative styles to the social problem of the “eternal necessity” of the Bellboy
(To the Lighthouse 14)––deeply concerned with the reach, and limits (epis-
temological and ethical) of “empathetic” imagination in its plumbing of
the inner life of (fictional) others. The question of sympathy, and its rela-
tionship 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.
162 Simon Cooke
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 termi-
nology 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 influ-
enzas, 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 atti-
tudes 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 work-
house, some absurdity of cat or dog to prevent one from turning the old beggar’s
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 fan-
tastic and unprofitable excursions. […] But such follies have had their day; civili-
zation 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 pas-
sage, the essay (and indeed her novels)13. The tone is that of someone
world-wearily reminding us of an uncomfortable, would-that-it-were-not-
so truth. The ambivalence registers in the irony of the way that her argu-
ment 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 imagin-
ing 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 convales-
cent of the essay who cries out for the divine relief of sympathy is very much in character
with the novel’s Mr. Ramsay.
164 Simon Cooke
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 di-
rectly (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 ac-
companied, 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 hu-
man 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 sym-
pathy 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 observa-
tion 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-
atic aspects (and thus attaches the value of literature to unstable founda-
tions) 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 promo-
tion 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 in-
terplay 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 Janu-
ary 1926 (xvii-xix) alongside work by other writers, including D.H. Law-
rence 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)—along-
side 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 prof-
fered (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 pre-
dict 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.
166 Simon Cooke
ety over her conclusions, points towards the increasingly modern experi-
ence pinpointed by Ulrich Beck as the problem of “cosmopolitan empa-
thy”:
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 interper-
sonal 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 sug-
gest 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 be-
came 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
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 lit-
erature 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 deter-
mined 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.
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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 post-
modernism,” 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, bio-
graphically embedded subjects and to the wider context of the intersub-
jective 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 in-
terpreting 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 re-
cent 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 ten-
dency. 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 be-
tween life and art, ethics and postmodernism becomes itself the focus of
narrative attention. It specifically explores the relationship between narra-
tive and ethics in the horizon of postmodern art, as represented by the
New York art scene of the later twentieth century.
_____________
1 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.
2 See, for example, Ette. See also Zapf.
172 Hubert Zapf
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 intel-
lectual 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 refer-
ence, and monocultural homogeneity, dehierarchization, process, cross-
cultural 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 empower-
ing 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 See, for example, Robert Inglehart, who interprets the shift from modernism to
postmodernism, somewhat schematically, as a shift from materialist to postmaterialist val-
ues, “[w]hich emphasize human autonomy and diversity instead of the hierarchy and con-
formity that are central to modernity” (27).
4 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 be-
come 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.
5 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.
Narrative, Ethics, and Postmodern Art in Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved 173
As theorists such as J. Hillis Miller, Paul Ricoeur, or Martha Nuss-

baum have pointed out in their different ways, ethical issues seem to re-
quire 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 tran-
scendence 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 imper-
sonal rules of thought and behavior. On the other hand, and for this very
reason, an ethics of literature also involves a resistance to unbroken, lin-
ear, 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 re-
sistance 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, in-
deed, the meaning of the text.8 Nonetheless, ethics does seem to necessi-
tate 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 litera-
ture, 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 pro-
vides a forum for the enactment of the dialogical interdependence be-
tween 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 See Miller; Nussbaum; Ricoeur.
7 Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself.
8 See Miller.
174 Hubert Zapf
consists precisely in their resistance to easy interpretation and appropria-

tion.
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 inter-
connections, provides the fictional groundwork for the conflictory dy-
namics 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 perspec-
tive 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 autono-
mous selves but as actors in a dynamical network of relationships, in
complex energy fields of differences and affinities which make them ap-
pear 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 illus-
trates 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 Hertz-

berg, 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 be-
fore. 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.
The book is divided into three parts, which are narrated in a roughly
chronological order, but often associative cuts are worked in or the se-
quence is interrupted by flashbacks. The narrated time stretches from the
beginning of Leo’s friendship with Wechsler in 1975 to the narrative pres-
ent, the year 2000, basically covering the last quarter of the twentieth
century. The first part relates how Leo, a Professor of Art History at Co-
lumbia 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 lit-
erature, 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 concentra-
tion 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. More-
over, 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 Ver-
mont. Matt and Mark grow up like brothers, even though below the sur-
face 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 vaca-
tion with Mark. Matt’s death is followed by his parents’ long mourning
process, which affects them in different ways and ends with their insuper-
able alienation. Erica accepts an offer from Berkeley and moves to Cali-
fornia; their marriage is now limited to letters, rare phone calls and a two-
week 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
176 Hubert Zapf
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 notori-
ous liar, plays truant, gets involved in the drug scene. But with breathtak-
ing 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 perform-
ance artist Teddy Giles, whose commercially oriented action art, focused
on sensational effects and visual orgies of violence, is an extreme counter-
pole 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 un-
folds that finally leads to the showdown in the Opryland Hotel in Nash-
ville, Tennessee, that is to say in one of the commercial centers of Ameri-
can 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 conse-
quence, he is helplessly at the mercy of Giles, who humiliates him and
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 fore-
ground 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 postmod-
ern world torn between humanizing and dehumanizing forces. It is a se-
ries 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
178 Hubert Zapf
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 state-
ments 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 vi-
sion was caused by strain from my work or maybe cataracts. When the ophthal-
mologist told me there was nothing to be done, because the form of macular de-
generation 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 type-
writer 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 gener-
alizing, 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 mov-
ing 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)
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 understand-
ing 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 nar-
ration solely associated with lack, negation, and failure, but also with spe-
cial 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 charac-
teristic 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 under-
lines that he has intensely studied and internalized the rich cultural-histori-
cal repertoire of seeing and perspectivism. On the basis of this compe-
tence, 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 pro-
fession. 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 Quali-
ties 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 influ-
ences transforms the apparent mono-perspective of Leo Hertzberg into
an internal polyphony of a narrative that manifests itself in the incorpora-
tion 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 cre-
ates 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 extraordi-
nary emotional intelligence, which allows him to put himself into other
people’s place almost to the point of self-effacement. Yet this emotional
180 Hubert Zapf
ability is itself highly ambivalent. On the one hand, it engenders an inter-

subjective 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 com-
pletely 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 mo-
ment 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 immedi-
ately afterwards. The letters confront Leo anew with Violet and Bill’s pas-
sionate love for each other and seem to kindle his own—hopeless—pas-
sion 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 de-
scribes 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-
members minutely. Also, he often looks at the photographs of his rela-

tives 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 confu-
sion—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 in-
scribed 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 ex-
perience 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 waste-
land 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 photo-
graphs 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 differ-
ent 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 answerabil-
ity. It is a search for orientation and meaning which brings about extreme
fragility, experience of loss, and self-exposure, but also a transformative
182 Hubert Zapf
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 ever-
changing, dynamic and relational concept of personality is composed into
the symbolic center of the text’s creative energies itself which Bill repre-
sents.
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 intui-
tively 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 writ-
ing 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 nar-
rator. 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. Uncom-
promising, 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
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 knowl-
edge: “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, intellec-
tual 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 as-
sociated 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 under-
mined. 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.
184 Hubert Zapf
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 differ-
ences, 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 dif-
ferent ways, creatively confront the complex problematic situations in
which they find themselves and deal with them as culturally relevant phe-
nomena. 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 some-
times 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 spell-
bound, 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 one-
sided. 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 espe-
cially successful in America, is rejected here in favor of dialogic interde-
pendence. 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 phe-
nomenon of eating disorders in the late twentieth century, which make the
boundaries of individuals and bodies unstable and fluid. This partly fasci-
nating, partly alienating interrelationship between persons, and the in-
eradicable 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-
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 mani-
fests itself in unreliability, deception and his participation in pseudo-artis-
tic, 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 fig-
ures—the ambivalence between love and rejection, and between his real
and surrogate mothers and fathers,—is transformed into his split exis-
tence 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 personal-
ity 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 rela-
tivizes this and Bill in fact cares for his son very much. Another is a cul-
tural interpretation that considers Mark as the symptom of a postmodern
zeitgeist and of a deep crisis of ethical values, which threaten to be con-
sumed 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, styl-
ishness and splatter, celebrity cult and cynicism. Mark’s perpetual dis-
guises, pretences and metamorphoses reflect, on a smaller scale, the per-
petual 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 differ-
ence 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 mythi-
cal-archetypal level. One expression of this level is the fairy tale Hansel and
186 Hubert Zapf
Gretel, which was Mark’s favorite fairy tale when he was a child and be-
comes 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 fa-
ther that the fairy tale implies, the primeval fear of children of being de-
serted 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 aban-
donment in a labyrinthine, impenetrable world whose deceptive simulacra
are threatening to devour them, becomes a metaphor for the human be-
ing’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 won-
ders 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 disap-
peared 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 para-
doxicality of relationships, the possibility of a fundamental deception re-
sulting 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.
The mysteriousness and final unavailability of a human being to all catego-

ries of explanation remain vivid in the case of Mark, and the acknowl-
edgement 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 com-
mercialized culture, it is radicalized here to a point which could be de-
scribed with Judith Butler as a critique of ethical violence itself: the chal-
lenge 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 fasci-
nated 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 funda-
mental for the novel and an integral part of its exploration on the bound-
ary-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 decen-
tralized, fragmentary and yet magically interlinked as the forms of percep-
tion and experience of life itself.
To interpret art as process and to interrelate it with personal and in-
terpersonal 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 corre-
spondence 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 emo-
tions, dreams, instincts, myth, and magic which form a significant part of
_____________
9 See Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself.
188 Hubert Zapf
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 radi-
cal experiments. The works of art of the past, just like those of the pres-
ent, are not dead museum pieces that should be looked at in an attitude of
uncritical consumption, but represent powerful energy-fields that are acti-
vated by ever new receptions, capable of producing unexpected existential
effects. One example is a scene in which Leo teaches a seminar in art his-
tory 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 re-
sults 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.
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 be-
came 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 excru-
ciating. (Ibid.)
It is because of its aesthetic defamiliarization and uncontrollable imagina-
tive dynamics that art is successful in triggering cathartic effects that con-
front people with their deepest, repressed problems and enable them to
integrate these problems into their conscious selves. The aesthetic activa-
tion 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 after-
wards 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. Al-
though 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 identifi-
able extratextual referent. Through Leo’s narrative voice, Hustvedt simu-
lates a world of visual imagination, which, nevertheless, exists only in lan-
guage. This allows the reader to participate in a creative process that
explores the theme of the novel in another medium, extending the lin-
guistic 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
190 Hubert Zapf
the naïve products of children’s imagination. There are always recogniz-

able 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 crea-
tive 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 acti-
vate. 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 con-
stant 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, pos-
tures, sizes and illuminations, shifting between close-up and distant per-
spective, increased and reduced body size, erotic pose and grotesque de-
formation. On one level, the pictures seem to mirror the body issues of
humans in modern civilizations—oscillating between obesity and ano-
rexia—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.
Fundamental aspects of Bill’s works become especially apparent in the

picture that Leo bought, which is described in great detail at the very be-
ginning 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 fo-
cus” that reminds Leo of the “distortions in dreams” (5), represents pre-
cisely 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.” Ac-
cordingly, 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 signi-
fier 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 hyper-
realism 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 ap-
plied 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
192 Hubert Zapf
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-explo-
ration through the staging of other lives and selves. In his artistic devel-
opment, 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 interre-
lated 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 them-
selves, which can still be perceived, as in a palimpsest, through the layers
of objects applied to the picture, even remind the narrator of seventeenth-
century 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 prin-
ciple 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, com-
ics, 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-
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 experimen-
tal 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 sur-
faces—the formulas of explanation that fall short of reality. At every turn, the de-
sire 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 crash-
ing 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.
Eds. G. Hoffmann and A. Hornung. Heidelberg: Winter 1996.
13-28.
194 Hubert Zapf
Hoffmann, Gerhard, and Alfred Hornung, eds. Ethics and Aesthetics: The
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 imagi-
nativer Texte an Beispielen des amerikanischen Romans. Tübingen: Nie-
meyer, 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,” “ac-
tion” 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, in-
deed, 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.
196 Wolfgang Hallet
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, per-
haps 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 ques-
tions is infinite, and they will all feature on a continuum somewhere be-
tween 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 read-
ers are affected and sometimes (mis-)lead by morally deficient characters,
particularly in those cases in which they function as unreliable homo-
diegetic 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 homo-
diegetic narrator: If we are made by the discourses we experience, what does ex-
periencing 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 ethi-
cal 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-
Can Literary Figures Serve as Ethical Models? 197
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 under-
stood 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 con-
cepts of “ethical agency” requires an integration of two different dimen-
sions (or ways of thinking); both of which are represented by literary fig-
ures 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 ori-
entation 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 im-
peratives) 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 be-
tween the intradiegetic world of the literary figure and the extradiegetic
world of the reader’s experiences. Most critical and narratological ap-
proaches are based on the assumption that literary texts, and their figures
198 Wolfgang Hallet
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 liter-
ary 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 fig-
ures in narrative texts often features most prominently: It has often been
pointed out that the reader has access to the minds, thoughts, and reflec-
tions 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, empiri-
cal 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 prac-
tical 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
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 an-
swer 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 problem-
atic 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, ac-
cording to our ethical standards, lack every ethical sense. On the other
hand, a reader may be inclined to sympathize with the four young crimi-
nals 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 unethi-
cal individuals. This novel also thematizes the unsettling question of
whether and to what extent free will, the choice to do evil, is an indispen-
sable part of any ethical existence, as Burgess explains in his 1988 intro-
duction 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 or-
ganism 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 any-
thing other than ethically to his character. As readers, we are also aware
that he, as an unreliable homodiegetic narrator, makes “clearly and egre-
giously wrong judgments” (Phelan, “Narrative Discourse” 137). There is
even a whole philosophy of non-ethical conduct, part of which is a vio-
lent, murderous daily life that is directed against the social and moral stan-
dards of members of the middle class, such as writers or teachers, and a
200 Wolfgang Hallet
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 con-
cepts 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 humiliat-
ing and oppressive conditioning process conducted by a totalitarian gov-
ernment, 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 psy-
chologist, 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 con-
cept that is, on the one hand, an ensemble of some rather abstract princi-
ples, 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
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 Janni-
dis’s narratological conception of the literary figure a reader’s identifica-
tion 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 ethi-
cal 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 sys-
tem
(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 de-
tective 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 ele-
ments 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 incorpo-
rates 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 in-
sights into the construction of ethical models may be found, I will consult
_____________
1 Cf. similar categories in Schneider, “Toward a Cognitive Theory” (613ff.).
202 Wolfgang Hallet
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 knowl-
edge, 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
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 psychologi-
cal actions of daily life. They enable individuals to make inferences and predic-
tions, 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 acquaint-
ance 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 inter-
esting 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 percep-
tions and experiences, is abstract and not concrete, and, vice versa, a liter-
ary 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 char-
acter also makes it possible to incorporate elements from fictional worlds
in such cognitive constructions of ways of life. On the other hand, readers
204 Wolfgang Hallet
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 ethi-
cal 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 liter-
ary 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 integra-
tion 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, char-
acter is
(1) like a possible person, it resembles a human being. Phelan calls this the mi-
metic 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, signi-
fying something abstract beyond itself. In that sense it is allegorical, car-
rying features that represent ideas or concepts which can easily be
processed and incorporated into a mental model and that can be trans-
ferred 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-
age of ruthless violence so that the reader would activate or incorporate

the ethical dimension of violence/non-violence in her or his mental ethi-
cal model. Once this has become or been confirmed as part of the ethical
model, violence/non-violence would principally be a criterion for in-
tended or experienced action and interaction or any moral judgment.
The synthetic dimension shows even more proximity to mental mod-
els. 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 homo-
diegetic 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 con-
structed 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 re-
sponse to changing situations. The literary figure, in other words, is a dy-
namic 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 be-
tween a model of ethical agency and a more static conception like a “sys-
tem 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 proc-
ess that occurs in social space and time. In such a mental model, an indi-
206 Wolfgang Hallet
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 ele-
ments (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 con-
text, 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, de-
veloped “bottom-up,” using and processing data and information avail-
able 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 circum-
stantial conditions of individual situations. (Schneider, “Toward a Cognitive The-
ory” 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 “informa-
tion 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 judg-
ments 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:
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 hu-
man actions and interactions. (Margolin 284)
Margolin also suggests that this kind of “meta-cognitive” reading—read-
ing a literary figure’s mind—affects and changes the reader’s mental dis-
position, his mental models since it
enriches our store of conceivable models of human experientiality, suggests vari-
ous views about its underlying features and regularities, and enlarges, through ex-
ample 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 indis-
pensable part of reading, we can easily imagine how this activity affects
every relevant dimension of the readers mind. If he or she has to con-
struct action, behavior and motives of a literary figure, the reader must
resort to her or his mental models of agency, behavior and ethical con-
duct. 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 cogni-
tive 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.
208 Wolfgang Hallet
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 con-
struction 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-knowl-
edge, 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 con-
struction 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 in-
dividuals’ 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), in-
cluding, 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 per-
son 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 ex-
erted. 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 stan-
dards 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
partly, be directly retrieved from the thematic and the synthetic

dimension of literary figures.
x Literary figures add the social, interactional and cultural dimen-
sion to an ethical model since they demonstrate that while they
are ethically free and responsible as individuals, they simultane-
ously 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.
x 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 ac-
tions 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, in-
cluding some sort of narrative structure that makes it possible to
represent real, imaginary or simulated ethical acts and ethical
agency in a mental model.
x 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.
x 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.
x In the act of reading narratives from a historically or culturally
distant period or space ethical models are exposed to or con-
structed 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 transhis-
torical and/or transcultural or hybrid construct. In that case, ethi-
cal 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
210 Wolfgang Hallet
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 lit-
erary figures in acts of reading and with real people and their ethi-
cal conduct in real life.
To summarize, mental ethical models are one of the cognitive key func-
tions 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 nar-
rative 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 them-
selves be applied to imagined ethical acts in the process of reading fic-
tional 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 cogni-
tive 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 con-
struction 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.
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, educa-
tion 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 mod-
eled 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 ab-
stract or synthetic character and due to the cognitive con-
struction 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 out-
come 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 out-
come. Thus mentally internal and fictional acts in possible
worlds may find their way into real life via mental ethical mod-
els.
Thus, the construction of an ethical model is a complex interplay of real-
life experiences, elements form mental models of literary figures and
simulations (“fictions”) of the mental system itself. Returning to the ques-
tion 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 cause-
effect 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 compara-
ble to real life experiences, can be sustained. In particular, literary figures
enhance the development of the narrative, reflexive and meta-cognitive
212 Wolfgang Hallet
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
cognitive formation
perception / schemata of ethical model
a b c
mental
ethical model
real life literature simulations
application / schemata
Fig. 1: The cognitive formation of ethical models
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 Nuss-
baum’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 In-
trige’; 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 like-
able/dislikeable orders are congruent, the result is a boring piece of lit-
erature which we would qualify as propaganda or, as von Matt calls it,
“didactic maltreatment” (109). In the reciprocal case, where all evil is like-
able 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 de-
mand or exigency, I claim, is an essential feature of those acts that can legiti-
mately 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 wrong-
doer” 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
214 Wolfgang Hallet
from it. Literary texts cannot exert power on us, and we are free to incor-
porate 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: Bal-
lantine 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: Cam-
bridge 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 Exter-
nal 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. Ber-
lin: 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 Integra-
tionsansatz. Paderborn: Mentis, 2004.
Margolin, Uri. “Cognitive Science, the Thinking Mind, and Literary Nar-
rative.” 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 pa-
per.
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 Nar-
rative. 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 sensi-
bility” which, so Eliot, set in during the seventeenth century, and from
which English poetry has never recovered (287 f.) To redress the ob-
served 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-scien-
tific 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 ethi-
cal agenda in both positions. The case of the Metaphysicals, of Dr. John-
son’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 differ-
ent.
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 rela-
tionship. There are examples of an instrumentalization of literary strate-
gies for the promotion of an ethical agenda and there are examples for
218 Jürgen Schlaeger
literary movements that violently refuse to be drawn into such question-

able business which, they claim, threatens literature’s “aesthetic auton-
omy,” 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, physi-
ology, 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 strat-
egy produce aesthetic pleasure, so A.S. Byatt, by exploiting and extending
the range of one particular, though central, aspect of our cognitive appa-
ratus.
The upshot of all this seems to be that concepts of the mind and con-
cepts of poetry as specific ways of using the mind’s strategies for generat-
ing 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 per-
spective, 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
The Ethical Dimension of Cognitive Poetics and “A Mechanism of Sensibility” 219
as a response to a historically specific, highly complex and diversi-

fied cultural environment?
x How can we understand the sequence of styles and ideational
paradigms other than as a sequence that depends entirely on con-
tingent 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 causali-
ties. “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 un-
comfortable 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 usu-
ally 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 nation-
alist 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 chil-
dren 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 re-
quirements 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 them-
selves and maybe the Irish way is sometimes better. In Germany, she says, people
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, there-
fore, 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 differ-
ences 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 differ-
ence 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 lan-
guage” (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 ex-
perience 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 net-
working activities of the mind which do not operate like strings of gram-
matical 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 Map-
ping 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).
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 lan-
guage 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, 86-
90). Most of these concepts are trying to capture the architecture of the
human brain, i.e., the spatial distribution of mental activities and their in-
teraction.
It comes as no surprise that—since we are a long way away from un-
derstanding exactly what is going on—most of these concepts have a
strong metaphorical flavor. Mappings and frames, paths and force dy-
namics, 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 under-
standing something new for which the frames and mental spaces and do-
mains 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
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 pack-
ages 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 Faucon-
nier, Turner and others, blending, i.e., the use of metaphorical construc-
tions, 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 circum-
stances.
If we take this admittedly still rather sketchy picture about what hap-
pens in the mind and its meaning-production processes when people use
language to face new challenges and explore new dimensions of the out-
side world and experience and apply it to my first case, metaphysical po-
etry or more narrowly metaphysical wit, one can understand why Dr.
Johnson, the defender of general human nature and a rational world pic-
ture, was deeply worried about them and why T.S. Eliot thought it fit to
resurrect them from obscurity and make them into something like fore-
runners 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 be-
ginning of the seventeenth century appeared a race of writers that may be termed
the metaphysical poets […]. If the father of criticism has rightly denominated po-
etry […], 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
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 sin-
gular 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 per-
verseness 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 re-
semblances 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 im-
provement dearly bought, and though he sometimes admires is seldom pleased.
(798 f.)
At least Dr. Johnson admits that the readers might be sometimes pleas-
antly 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 strat-
egy which the metaphysical poets adopted is crucial for creating the lin-
guistic 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 be-
fore, and how short-sighted it was for him to refuse the Metaphysicals the
honor of calling them poets in their own right.
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 hard-
wired into its system. This is obviously what the confusions and com-
plexities 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 con-
structions 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-
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 con-
stant 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 Augus-
tan wit helped establish altogether different processing conventions in our
cognitive apparatus.
The generation of writers and intellectuals who followed the turbu-
lences 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 re-
garding 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 at-
tempt 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-
mentary, consistent with Enlightenment tenets. Pope is here a very good

case in point. The steady rhythm of the heroic couplet which he devel-
oped 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 overvalua-
tion 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 estab-
lished 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 multidimen-
sional 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 con-
cepts and make them harder to unlodge. This is the sticky side of Roman-
ticism 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 un-
specific 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
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. Cam-
bridge: 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: Cam-
bridge 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.
Tsur, Reuven. Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics. Amsterdam: Elsevier Sci-

ence Publishing Company, 1992.
Turner, Mark. The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. Ox-
ford: 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 re-
sponses 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 post-
modernist discourse about architecture: Le Corbusier, for example, em-
phasizes that “architecture has for its first duty that of bringing about a
revision of values” (qtd. in Capon 99). In his classic of modern architec-
tural 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 “cen-
tral 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 mani-
festations 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).
232 Astrid Erll
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 ap-
proach 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 phe-
nomenon 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 recon-
struct 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-Sara-
cenic 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 per-
haps 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 conceptu-
alized 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.
Ethics in Stone: The Architecture of the Raj 233
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 frag-
ments 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. “Unnatu-
ral” and “untruthful” artistic forms, as exemplified in the Oriental orna-
mentation 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 argu-
ment, 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 architec-
ture 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 con-
ceptual 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 See Mitter’s book of the same name.
4 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 re-
sponding 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).
234 Astrid Erll
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. Never-
theless, Ruskin’s writings were eminently influential for the Victorian vi-
sion 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 “art-
less” and yet “natural” Scotsman: “You will find upon reflection, that all
the highest points of the Scottish character are connected with impres-
sions derived straight from the natural scenery of their country” (266).
Ruskin goes on to lecture his audience about the far-reaching conse-
quences that the differences in Indian and Scottish national character im-
ply: “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 under-
stands architecture as an “index” of social mores: “However much a period tries to dis-
guise itself, its real nature will still show through in its architecture. […] It is as an unmis-
takable index to what is really going on in a period that architecture is indispensable when
we are seeking to evaluate that period” (20).
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. Nev-
ertheless, what had just reached another peak in the British press were
atrocity stories about Indian cruelties and—at the same time—the fabri-
cation 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 Me-
moriam, 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 or-
der to rescue English women and children.7
_____________
6 For the genesis and medial representations of the “Jessie Brown” myth see Erll, Prämedia-
tion–Remediation. See also Erll, “Re-Writing as Re-Visioning.”
7 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 En-
glish 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 High-
land soldier. See Erll, Prämediation–Remediation; Erll, “Representing the ‘Indian Mutiny’”;
and Thomas.
236 Astrid Erll
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 de-
livered 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
his treachery. And indeed, Ruskin’s lecture not only dwells on the ethics
of ornamental detail, but also echoes some of the most prevalent stereo-
types 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 civiliza-
tion,—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 fol-
lowing, 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 ele-
ments into British building, I will take a look at a phenomenon of the
early nineteenth century, which, to the British, was even worse than In-
dian 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-
238 Astrid Erll
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 cosmo-
politan city, welcoming immigrants from all over India, and also Europe-
ans, 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 devel-
opment 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 (1775-
1797), 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 Chi-
nese 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 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, fas-
tidiousness, mannerist behaviour, reflected in costume and over-elaborate etiquette—the
idle preoccupations of a powerless aristocracy with a surfeit of enforced leisure” (5).
9 On Lucknow’s history and culture see Graff; Llewellyn-Jones, A Fatal Friendship; and
Dalrymple.
10 On Lucknow’s nawabi architecture see Metcalf, An Imperial Vision; Llewelyn-Jones, A Fatal
Friendship.
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 re-
minded 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 “un-
utterable 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 pu-
erility and want of stability about it, characteristic enough of its mon-
archs” (375). Precisely how these monarchs appeared to British eyes be-
comes 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, cor-
ruption, 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).
_____________
11 See Parlby’s Indian travel diary of the same name: Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the
Picturesque (1850).
240 Astrid Erll
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 fre-
quently, 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 ex-
plicit 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-
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 enter-
tainment with Lucknow nawabi buildings serves of course to show that the
Indian rulers’ taste was uneducated, their royal character merely pleasure-
seeking, 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.
242 Astrid Erll
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 aes-
thetic 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 appro-
priation 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.
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 ex-
ample 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 other-
wise 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 ex-
clamations of the British visitors of Lucknow quoted above must there-
fore all be understood to have contributed in one way or another to the
verdict of “despotism,” which was seen to be evident in Indian architec-
ture as well as in the character of its rulers—and which provided the Brit-
ish 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 annexa-
tion 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 architec-
ture 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 them-
selves 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)
244 Astrid Erll
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
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 knowl-
edge 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 unac-
ceptable 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 Sara-
cenic 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 For the British colonial order of knowledge see Cohn; Metcalf, Ideologies.
16 For the dynamics of Orientalism see Said; for Orientalism with regard to architecture see
also MacKenzie.
246 Astrid Erll
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 ex-
tended well into the first half of the nineteenth century, when tastes had
already changed in Europe. What Roman and Grecian styles seem to ex-
press 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 Derby-
shire (fig. 6). Buildings like the Calcutta Government House conveyed a
kind of “ordered beauty” which was meant to be beneficent for the “un-
civilized” colonial subjects. Classical styles of architecture in British India
were therefore also part of the liberal project of transforming Indian soci-
ety 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.
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 his-
torical and ideological turning point the British style of colonial architec-
ture also changed. After the “Indian Mutiny,” the informal empire, con-
trolled 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 In-
dia––civilization on the one hand and an utterly uncivilized (and uncivi-
lizable) 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 Mu-
tiny,” the British fashioned themselves as the only rulers over India who
could manage a vast country sunk into disorder. They presented them-
selves 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 Mus-
lim 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 Em-
pire was transferred to India: The school was to provide training in self-
_____________
18 For the different ideologies of the Raj see Metcalf, Ideologies.
19 See Metcalf, Ideologies.
248 Astrid Erll
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.
only Mayo College, but many other educational buildings had such clock
towers added. The symbolism––ethical and political––of such an archi-
tectural detail is evident: The clock is an element of the “new era” of Brit-
ish rule in India. It stands for the fight against the (according to the Brit-
ish, 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 con-
crete in fact became important building materials in late-nineteenth-
century 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 ex-
pression in the medium of architecture.
_____________
21 The Builder 1874, qtd. in Metcalf, Imperial Vision 78.
250 Astrid Erll
5. Conclusion: Architecture, Hybridity, and the

Dissemination of Values in Cultural Context
Today, it is a commonplace to note that ethical and aesthetical considera-

tions 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 me-
dium 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 val-
ues 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 produc-
tion, the artwork itself and its forms, and its reception and various func-
tionalizations—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 archi-
tecture? British buildings in India are an example of a fairly open and in-
tentional dissemination of values in the medium of architecture—in Gra-
bes’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 under-
stood 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.
Muslim styles), of materials used (e.g. steel), and of specific design ele-
ments (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 cross-
cultural 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 com-
bination 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 de-
familiarizing 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 me-
dium of architecture led nineteenth-century viewers to experience and re-
evaluate 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 differ-
ent 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 ethi-
cal 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).
252 Astrid Erll
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.
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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 colo-
nial 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 them-
selves, but to rebel as colonial children against the imperial mother-coun-
try, 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 con-
cept of ethics tends to be intimately linked to the family and other close-
knit relations: “Ethics […] guides our thick relations” (Margalit 37), which
are “grounded in attributes such as parent, friend, lover, fellow-country-
man” (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 un-
canny 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 cul-
ture and imperialism, between discourses and power structures, converg-
_____________
1 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).
2 Lord Curzon, quoted in Ferguson (XXIII).
256 Ansgar Nünning & Jan Rupp
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 am-
biguous phrase “fictions of empire” (V. Nünning/A. Nünning).3 Meta-
phors 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 vari-
ous 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 unas-
sailability 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 obvi-
ous that imperialism was eulogized in and for the colonial world as a no-
ble 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 metropoli-
tan center, too.
_____________
3 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 conven-
tionally accepted for some reason of practical convenience, conformity with traditional us-
age, decorum, or the like.” See Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “fiction.”
4 The term is first used in A. Nünning, “Das Britische Weltreich als Familie” and “Meta-
phors of Empire.” Metaphors of empire are those by which the Empire itself was de-
scribed, as opposed to metaphors simply used in some connection or other with imperial-
ism. 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.
Imperialist Values in Late Victorian Literature and Other Media 257
2. An Empire “of the Mind”: The “Problem” of Unity
Given the aplomb of late nineteenth-century high imperialism, it is a fa-

miliar paradox that running through the history of the British Empire was
a subcurrent of unease, often with the very term or notion of empire it-
self. 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, tyr-
anny, 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 con-
cern. In his widely read treatise on empire, Oceana, or England and her Colo-
nies, 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 ambiva-
lence 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.
colonies. In doing so, he was providing answers to a question that is ex-

plicitly 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 con-
structed, how it was given shape, meaning and value. The main reason
why metaphors are so important is that the ideological fictions of imperi-
alism find their most succinct expression in conventional images, plot-
lines, and myths that support and legitimize the imperial project.6 In the
process, metaphors of empire constructed and disseminated a highly nor-
mative 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 nar-
rative 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 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 ins-
gesamt zu strukturieren scheinen” (139-140).
7 For a discussion of how the metaphor of the imperial family was adduced to stage Victo-
rian 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 Im-
perial family under the British Crown […]; in consequence none of the kings who had at-
tended 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).
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 dis-
course 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 ten-
dency to talk about the Empire in metaphorical terms is not hard to de-
termine. Resorting to metaphors was one way of conceptualizing some-
thing 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, Swin-
burne, Kipling, and Newbolt—to history writing, travel literature, political
_____________
8 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 meta-
phor theory, see A. Nünning, “Metaphors the British Thought, Felt and Ruled By,” “On
the Emergence of an Empire of the Mind.”
9 See Demandt’s, Peil’s, and Münkler’s encyclopedic monographs.
10 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).
speeches, and journalism. It is in poetry that the idea finds its most power-
ful expression,11 perhaps, but it informs a host of other genres and media
as well. Even though the overall repertoire of rhetorical tropes in imperi-
alist discourse is quite broad,12 the number of metaphors deployed to de-
scribe 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 meta-
phors 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 Writ-
ers 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, re-
marks that the tie between England and the British subjects in the colo-
nies “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 sugges-
tive picture of the colonies as the source of the nation’s life: “The life of a
_____________
11 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 Müllen-
brock 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).
12 For two excellent studies on the rhetoric of empire, see Suleri and Spurr, who do not,
however, examine metaphors of empire more specifically.
13 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 ‘empire-
builder’, 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 Eng-
land’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 ig-
nore; see Demandt: “Organische und anorganische Natur waren Herkunftsbereiche von
Metaphern, in denen der handelnde Mensch keine eigentliche Bedeutung besaß” (271).
14 For an in-depth study of the use of this metaphor, see Birk/Neumann.
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 nutri-
ment 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 an-
swer, 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 elabo-
rate 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 mo-
tionless 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 “Vic-
torian 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 See, for instance, Tennyson: “Her dauntless army scattered, and so small,/ Her island-
myriads 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 Ex-
iles’ Line.”
16 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).
“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 com-
munities 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 alli-
ance. (Seeley 45)
The implications of kinship metaphors are not very difficult to deter-
mine.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 Em-
pire 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 defini-
tion of the term colony may serve to show. First, kinship metaphors imply
notions of order, succession, and lineage. They suggest that colonies actu-
ally 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 See, for instance, the ode that Sir Lewis Morris composed in celebration of Queen Victo-
ria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897: “Mother of all freemen! over all the earth/ Thy Empire-
children come to thy birth/ Vast continents are thine, or spring from thee/ Brave island-
fortress 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.
18 The following analysis is indebted to Lakoff/Johnson, Lakoff/Turner, and to Turner’s (15-
77) and Rigotti’s (77-114) pioneering work on kinship metaphors.
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 colo-
nial 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 target-
domain, then, is an investigation of the properties and cultural connota-
tions associated with any given source-domain. As far as the metaphor of
the imperial family of what became “Greater Britain” (Dilke, Greater Brit-
ain: 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 fea-
turing 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 under-
stood, 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 observa-
tion by Froude shows: “The colonists […] are proud of belonging to a
_____________
19 For the concept of “Bildfeld,” see Weinrich and Peil 24ff..
20 Punch 87 (1884, 306).
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 disagree-
ments, 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 relation-
ship was meant to prevent—and pre-empt in ethical terms—whatever
conflicts might arise. The kinship terms demonstrate that the “whole im-
perial 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 mother-
country. 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 solu-
tion: “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 Victo-
rian 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” ac-
tually is.
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 sug-
gestive 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 meta-
phors at face value or even mistaking such tropes for a simple reflection
of historical realities, therefore, one might look more closely at the func-
tions 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 concep-
tual 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 mis-
leading, 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 La-
koff/Johnson.
were nothing but conceptual models. Equating these metaphors with

models ignores the creative potential of metaphors in representing ob-
jects. 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 concep-
tual 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 Em-
pire, 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 con-
temporaries 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 experi-
ence. By actually commenting upon the events and relations they pur-
ported 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 Weinrich (309) also argues that metaphors create their analogies and correspondences. For
the similarities and differences between metaphors and models, see the articles in Haver-
kamp and Bergem/Bluhm/Marx.
24 See Ricoeur 143 and Köller, who also emphasizes the “konnotativen Komponenten und
emotionalen Werkakzentuierungen” (202).
find, as ages run,/ The mother featured in the son”). The third stanza
provides an interesting example of how kinship metaphors served to re-
interpret 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 colo-
nies 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 “care-
less of our growing kin.” In the final stanza of Tennyson’s poem, the pa-
triotic 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 question-
able unity of the British Empire is finally affirmed in a unanimous excla-
mation:
Britain’s myriad voices call,
‘Sons, be welded each and all,
Into one imperial whole,
One with Britain, heart and soul!
_____________
25 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 rela-
tionship. […] 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.
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 some-
what 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 imperial-
ism 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 articu-
lated by Coventry Patmore’s famous poem “The Angel in the House”
(1854), for instance, or John Ruskin’s popular lecture “Of Queens’ Gar-
dens” (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 imperi-
alism—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).
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 rela-
tion 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 impe-
rial 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 percep-
tion of both the target-domain and the source-domain. On the one hand,
this metaphor determined the way in which the British Empire was con-
ceptualized. On the other hand, it also affected the way in which the Vic-
torian 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 Crys-
tal 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 be-
tween adult communities when they are on both sides free. (Gladstone 572)
_____________
27 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.
Sixth, metaphors of empire fulfil legitimizing functions because they pro-

vided 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 Em-
pire 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 ar-
guably served as subtle ideological tools of imperialism, because they glo-
rified the imperial relationship by disseminating highly advantageous im-
ages of it. Metaphors helped to create that culturally sanctioned system of
ideas, beliefs, presuppositions, and convictions which constitutes impe-
rialist mentalities.28
Lastly, metaphors of empire were central to the formation of collec-
tive identities. The images and stories projected by metaphors were in-
strumental 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. En-
hancing 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 rep-
resenting the Empire, these metaphors ultimately shaped the prevailing
view of the relationship between England and her colonies. In doing so,
_____________
28 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).
29 For the concept of imagined communities, see Anderson.
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 impe-
rialism 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 imagina-
tion of empire” (12). Like the narratives, myths, and fictions they in-
volved, they played an important part in the making of imperialist men-
talities, 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 maintain-
ing 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’ encyclo-
pedia” (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 de-
scribing 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 func-
tional advantages of kinship metaphors, is their power to represent com-
plex 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 rela-
tionship 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 meta-
phors, but whole cultures.30 The suggestive and familiar notions of the
metaphor of the Empire as a family served to create and support the per-
ceptual 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).
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 con-
struction of reality:
Were Oceana an accepted article of faith, received and acknowledged as some-
thing 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 signifi-
cance 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 be-
tween 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 impe-
rial 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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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 abolish-
ing all hierarchies and anything smacking of elitism. But the literary histo-
rians 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 belles-
lettres 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 On the “canon wars” see Casement; Jay; Robinson; Müller, “Zwischen kulturellem
Nationalismus und Multikulturalismus”; Grabes, “The Canon Pro and Contra.”
2 See Sichert and Grabes.
280 Margit Sichert
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 Anglo-
Saxon 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, influ-
enced 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 psy-
cho-social and political savior, seems to have found a more peaceful solu-
tion—he endeavored to rescue national unity through the values of liter-
ary 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 Nor-
man 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.”
Prominent Values in Nineteenth-Century Histories of English Literature 281
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 knowl-
edge 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 op-
pressor. (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 origi-
nals 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 pow-
ers 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 sub-
lime. (540)
1853 and 1855 were years of triumph for literary historians and their en-
deavors to educate the nation: in 1853, public examinations for the Eng-
lish 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 See Langford 267-301.
5 See Barker, The Character, especially the article by J.A. Williamson.
6 See Stierstorfer 258.
7 “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).
282 Margit Sichert
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 Litera-
ture 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 conceiv-
able 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 civi-
lized 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 reli-
gious 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 For Henry Morley’s views see further Sichert, “Henry Morley’s First Sketch.”
9 Gross 172.
German Anglo-Saxons, from whom the English nation, in his view, in-
herited 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 po-
etry […]. 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 Em-
pire, 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 his-
tory 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 chan-
son 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 See Hall.
11 Grabes, “Elect Nation.”
12 For more information see Jacks 1: 286.
284 Margit Sichert
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 Col-
lier 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 commu-
nity.
When looking for the particular qualities that make up the value of
Englishness, we find that Shaw in his literary history leads us from land-
scape poetry to the beauty of the English landscape and then to the “in-
tensity 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 ex-
ternal 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 capri-
cious 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 tradi-
tion particularly valuable because it invalidates the cliché that the English
were a nation of mean shopkeepers. “To form plans too vast to be real-
ized seems rather characteristic of English literary men,” he writes, con-
tinuing:
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 hu-
man 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 For the more recent discussion of the Englishness of the writing of English literary history
itself see A. Nünning.
14 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).
And again, Arnold, like other literary historians of this time, takes
pride in the importance of liberty for the English. What he adds is manli-
ness, so that he can speak of the “manful proud spirit of English free-
dom” (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 prod-
uct 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 pre-
sent the one or other author as an exemplar, or at least as someone em-
bodying 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 empha-
sizes:
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 espe-
cially 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)
_____________
15 “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).
16 See Langford, especially “Practicality”.
17 “[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).
18 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).
286 Margit Sichert
This strength of character had enabled Wiclif, along with the English peo-
ple, 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 li-
cence and vice of continental life, as it then was, he passed pure and un-
stained, 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 representa-
tive of Englishness would be someone who shows a deep religious orien-
tation20 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” (Mor-
ley 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 state-
ment we find at the end of his literary history: “To think of one [Caed-
_____________
19 “[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 con-
sciousness 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 Eng-
lish 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).
20 “[…] 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.”
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 cho-
sen 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 English-
ness,22 and this is embodied by Chaucer—the first to bring laughter into
_____________
21 “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 re-
mote 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 pro-
pitious 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 po-
etry springs.” (Sutherland 305)
22 “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 ser-
mons: it was a mixture of stoicism with medieval lay chivalry, and of both with uncon-
scious 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)
288 Margit Sichert
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,” “ar-
tistic eminence,” “active and bold fancy,” “delight in music,” “delight in
bright colour,” and a “sense of literature as an art” (Morley 9) as the heri-
tage 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 au-

thors of the histories of national literature was a matter of special concern.
Shaw, for instance, as a proud promoter of English values at St. Peters-
burgh, 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 civi-
lized 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
_____________
23 “In our literature, laughter, in fact, begins with Chaucer. Whatsoever things are ‘Old Eng-
lish’ 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)
24 “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 af-
front 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 for-
giveness. 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)
25 “The best of our literary humour falls, compared with that of other nations, serious and
tender” (ibid.).
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 char-
acterized by an extraordinary strength, and an extraordinary will, sur-
mounting 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, be-
came 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 passer-
by. (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 him-
self 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 open-
ness.
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.
290 Margit Sichert
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 gen-
tleman” (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 nar-
rative calculated rather to bewilder and mislead than to instruct or to im-
prove 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 nineteenth-
century, 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 impress-
ingly 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 Eng-
lish 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 differ-
ent 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 peculi-
arities 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.
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 litera-
ture 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 preacher-
teacher. He keeps praising, reproaching, encouraging, consoling, and al-
ways 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 Victo-
rian work-ethic28, an important pillar of Victorian ideology: “Chaucer en-
joyed 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 ex-
amples 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 inter-
pretation. 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 ac-
cording 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.
292 Margit Sichert
there is an immorality of tone and a mockery of religious truth which

renders his most fascinating works the most dangerous to young and un-
wary readers” (178). While in contrast, he praises Addison “for his teach-
ing 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 induc-
tively 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 widely-
known aesthetic values as well. A pertinent instance is Collier’s literary
history. His moral vein does not prevent his praise from occasionally be-
ing strongly determined by the ut pictura poesis principle, as in his charac-
terization 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 bril-
liant 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 eight-
eenth-century tragedies, in which he discovers “a virtuous ardour which
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 gath-
ered, 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 impor-
tance 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 con-
quered 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 some-
times 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 hu-
man 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-
294 Margit Sichert
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 to-
wards other nations. Of course, it helped the English nation to become a
world power, a huge Empire, for some time. The English made them-
selves so great and the others so small—and for this created fitting meta-
phors to live by: we are the mother country and the others are the chil-
dren. 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 les-
sons 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 lit-
erary 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 bath-
water? 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 lan-
guage not robbed of its emotional appeal? Are we not dominated by tech-
nical 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
_____________
29 “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.).
historians of the nineteenth century reached such a reader.30 Why don’t we

try to do so too?
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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 Criti-
cism 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 indis-
tinct, 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 commen-
tary or judgment in their writing. Recent theoretical work on Literary
Impressionism has emphasized perception; epistemology and phenom-
enology; this has tended to downplay the ethical.1 Thus what I am investi-
gating 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 Con-
rad. 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.
300 Max Saunders
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 Im-
pressionism we have, though it’s still relatively little-known—partly be-
cause 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 prac-
tice 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 Im-
pressionist 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 cer-
tainly used the term, and who have been called Impressionist, were them-
selves wary of the label.3 Literary History has tended to think of this kind
of literary impressionism as something that turns into modernism in lit-
erature at about the time, or soon after the time, when pictorial Impres-
sionism turned into Post-Impressionism, i.e., around 1910, when accord-
ing to Virginia Woolf’s famous remark, human character changed; and
one reason why she might have thought that was the First Post-Impres-
sionist exhibition in London organized by her friend Roger Fry, in that
year.
So the literature that follows this period was called “Modernist,” be-
ginning 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 avant-
garde movements such as Futurism, Cubism, or Vorticism.
_____________
2 Saunders, “Modernism,” and “Ford, the City.”
3 See Knapp Hay.
Impressionism, Fiction, and the Location of the Ethical 301
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 “Mod-
ernists.” 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 litera-
ture—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). Per-
haps by then he was too old an Impressionist to change his spots; cer-
tainly, 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, aestheti-
cism, 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 judg-
ment, 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 sus-
tain illusionistic involvement. (We might note that already there’s a con-
tradiction 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 an-
tipathetic 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 at-
tention 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 See Poole.
5 See for example Empson.
302 Max Saunders
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 au-
thor’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 nov-
elist 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 problem-
atic, certainly. But before discussing Booth’s concerns about it, and sug-
gesting 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 experi-
ence 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 au-
thorial intrusion much earlier. Though Impressionism, and the movement
towards objectivity in fiction are championed from the late nineteenth-
century, 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 unobtru-
sive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle or amaze with it-
self, but with its subject. (Keats, Letters 43, 61)
It is at the same time that free indirect style, in which the author’s or nar-
rator’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.
When society broadly agrees about, and enforces, a monolithic theologi-

cally-grounded morality then moral comment is unobjectionable. But the
Romantic philosophy of mind, with its specter, solipsism, elicits a differ-
ent 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, ac-
cording 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 cen-
tury 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 preoc-
cupation”:
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 cab-
man may drive his taxi through exceedingly difficult streets; he may have half-a-
dozen 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 neces-
sarily 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 pas-
sion only becomes respectable when you have killed it. (Ford, “On Impression-
ism” 271-2)
This is a more democratic version, perhaps, of the ability T. S. Eliot ad-
mired 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 nineteenth-
century writers came to feel that art’s position was between religious con-
304 Max Saunders
servatism and political radicalism; between right and left; between mysti-
cism 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. Aes-
theticism doesn’t just do beauty, or show it, it has to tell us what’s beauti-
ful 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 snob-
bish 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-advo-
cacy. 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 ob-
jecting 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 fore-
going 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 char-
acters’ 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”
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 cele-
brated 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 re-
projected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic, like that of ma-
terial creation, is accomplished. The artist, like the God of creation, remains
within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of ex-
istence, 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 with-
out 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 sug-
gested 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 inter-
posing of the objective in between a character and the reader’s subjectiv-
ity. In short, what’s wrong with telling (from this point of view) isn’t sub-
jectivity 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 show-
ing 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.”
306 Max Saunders
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 selec-
tion 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 experienc-
ing an unfolding ethical predicament.]
But when we consider the case of D. H. Lawrence, the arguments be-
come more complex. For Lawrence—and it is bound up with his ambiva-
lent 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.”
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 emo-
tional experience. And then, if we have the courage of our own feelings, it be-
comes 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 depress-
ing, 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 de-
signs 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 essen-
tial feature of Lawrence’s view of the novel that though artists may in-
clude 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 Law-
rence 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 discov-
ered. 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)
308 Max Saunders
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 with-
holding of judgment. The passional life is better than an attempt to re-
press 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 Law-
rence, it helps us get at the truth of our experience, by escaping the mor-
alist 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 (ap-
ropos the first argument) Tolstoy doesn’t condemn Anna and Vronsky
explicitly. Rather than saying they are being punished for adultery, he af-
fixes 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 inexora-
ble 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 in-
corporates 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 object-
ing 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 soci-
ety”—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
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 some-
thing different. He starts with a categorical frame, but the certainties va-
porize 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 Impres-
sionism, but such a good example of how his critical imagination is ener-
gized by his creative (and recreative) imagination:
The main and perhaps most passionate tenet of impressionism was the suppres-
sion 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 im-
pinged 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)
310 Max Saunders
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 ver-
balize 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 im-
portant. In this case, a third kind of defense of “showing,” which is that
the judgment it enables is a more complex, more responsible one, recog-
nizing 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 po-
litely, “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
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 un-
derstood 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 “techni-
cal 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.
312 Max Saunders
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 “per-
sonality” 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 com-
ment. 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 every-
thing 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
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 aston-
ishment 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 de-
scription 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 problemat-
ics of language in a fantasmatic prioritizing of speech over writing, Im-
pressionism 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 prob-
lem”—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 Per-
sonal 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 ex-
pression 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).
314 Max Saunders
but unexpectedly self-sacrificing, a dreadful liar but a most painfully careful stu-
dent 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 chronologi-
cally 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 as-
semble 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 Represen-
tation 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.
Empson, William. “Virginia Woolf”. Argufying. London: Chatto and

Windus, 1987. 443-49.
Ford Madox (Hueffer) Ford. “Literary Portraits: VIII. Mr. Joseph Con-
rad.” 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 Commemo-
ration. 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: Cam-
bridge UP, 2001.
Poole, Roger. “How Should We Read Ford?” Ford Madox Ford and “The
Republic of Letters.” Eds. Vita Fortunati and Elena Lamberti. Bolo-
gna: CLUEB, 2002. 181-93.
316 Max Saunders
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 Re-
view 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 Chris-
tian belief. Dan Brown might have answered that he had written a work of
fiction which is by nature ambivalent and which offers multiple perspec-
tives 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).
318 Annette Simonis
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, chal-
lenges 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 polariza-
tion of good and evil; a reduction of far more complex modern ethical
views. Still, the controversial response to Brown’s thriller raises the ques-
tion 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 be-
lief 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 gen-
eral and poetry in particular were supposed to comprise an ethical dimen-
sion which legitimated them as useful things. Indeed, Medieval and Ren-
aissance 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 Ibid.
3 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 sur-
rounding his novel.
Ethics and Aesthetics in Modern Literature and Theory: A Paradoxical Alliance? 319
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 vir-
tutis or negative examples of vice became obsolete, and is thus to be con-
sidered 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 so-
called “socialist realism” (‘sozialistischer Realismus’) it proved to be an
obstacle for the authors involved rather than an inspiring element of po-
etics. Christa Wolf’s texts, for instance Nachdenken über Christa T. (‘Re-
flecting 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 “De-
fence of Poetry” in 1821 (508). Shelley enlarges on the eminent role in
society he ascribes to the poetic writer, when he points out the anticipa-
tory dimension of literature: “Poets are the hierophants of an unappre-
hended 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 es-
sential 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 con-
fused 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).
320 Annette Simonis
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 passion-
ate sensual experience rather than rational thought or judgment. The lan-
guage is highly suggestive of the notion of aesthetic energy. Compare for
instance the observation that “poetry is a sword of lightning ever un-
sheathed 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 gener-
als to the bewildered armies of their thoughts. (Ibid. 492-493)
In his Defence of Poetry Shelley thus focuses on an energetic concept of in-
volvement which is based on sensuality and passion rather than on emo-
tion 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 inter-
pretations 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 crite-
rion 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 in-
spired by William Blake’s sympathetic reading: “Nothing can exceed the energy and mag-
nificence of the character of Satan as expressed in ‘Paradise Lost’. It is a mistake to sup-
pose that he could ever have been intended for the popular personification of evil. Impla-
cable 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 con-
ceived 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 mis-
taken 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)
21 December 1817 he explains his conception of intense aesthetic experi-

ence: “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 cir-
cumstance 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 Shake-
speare 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 sus-
pending 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 in-
triguing 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 par-
ticuler 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 de-
scription, 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
322 Annette Simonis
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 conserva-
tive 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 com-
mon 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 com-
municating 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
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 unpoeti-
cal 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 un-
changeable 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 re-
frain 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 di-
verse forms of specifically modern writing, in the critical stance, the satiri-
cal 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 prin-
cipal 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 sub-
tle 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.
324 Annette Simonis
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 paradoxi-
cal, 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 au-
thor 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 dia-
metrically opposed. The description of ethics is confined to the semantics
of literary texts. Wilde’s skepticism against an ethical dimension of litera-
ture 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 unimagina-
tive” (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 blend-
ing of both aspects: the implicit moral view of the satirical writer and the
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-embodi-
ment of aestheticist criticism, yet in a more serious appearance.
Moreover, in Wilde’s poetics, the Victorian claims of realism and au-
thenticity are replaced by the new conception of a precise imagination.
According to Wilde the detailed description of imagined experience ex-
pected 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 di-
mension, 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 re-
stricted 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 interpreta-
tion 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 contemporar-
ies to demand of the poor that they practice economy, since they have
nothing to spare anyway:
326 Annette Simonis
But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like ad-
vising a man who is starving to eat less. For a town or country labourer to prac-
tise 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 defi-
ciency 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, dis-
contented, 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 senti-
mentalist 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 im-
plicit evaluation, instead of endorsing a positive, concrete set of values.
_____________
6 This dimension of Wilde’s writing has been brilliantly elucidated by Dollimore with refer-
ence to sex and gender in his seminal study. The theme of dissidence and gender in the
Victorian age is further discussed by Dellamora.
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 com-
plex 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 lit-
erature takes on the form of an absence or negativity—in Theodor W.
Adorno’s sense. Often the ethical outlook or perspective in modern lit-
erature and theory is articulated by a mode of dissidence, revocation,
negativity, deviance and subversion, and not in positive terms. This ap-
plies 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 ökono-
mischen 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 ju-
risdiction, 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 di-
mension 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-
328 Annette Simonis
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 an-
swer, 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 Sexual-
ity, 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 punish-
ment, 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 su-
pervision. The imprisoned have the impression of being permanently
watched and controlled in their actions. Thus the Panopticon is a meta-
phor of the Enlightenment practice and disciplinary impulse which ac-
cording 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 sociali-
zation, education and disciplinary processes. Ethics, it seems, on the sur-
face level of theory, has become a question of discourse as well as a ques-
tion 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 consti-
tutes 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.
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 Fou-
cault, 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 theo-
rists develop a new form of political ethics which has more or less re-
placed 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 indispen-
sable 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-
330 Annette Simonis
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 occi-
dentale. 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 indispensa-
ble 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 gou-
vernementalité—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 pouvoir-
gouvernementalité-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 subjec-
tive 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 Quotation from http://1libertaire.free.fr/Foucault53.html (n. pag.).
9 Ibid.
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 recon-
stituer une éthique du soi.10
When envisaging the designing of a personal ethics as a new task of cul-
tural 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 Fou-
cault’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. Al-
though 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 Fou-
cault 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 ‘mod-
erne’. 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 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
332 Annette Simonis
those designs of society and culture the individual human beings always
move, act and communicate within a given framework of notions, dis-
course 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. Green-
blatt 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 attrib-
ute 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 Ed-
mund 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 ar-
resting 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 counter-
discourses and subversion. The discussion focuses on exploring the scope
and function of deviant and marginal views. Can such elements of dis-
course 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 opera-
tive. 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 per-
haps) as to whether a text tends more to the pole of containment or sub-
version. Greenblatt explores this by reading and re-examining Shakespear-
ean tragedies like King Lear or Hamlet.
Another representative of implicit ethical thought in literary and cul-
tural theory is the German philosopher Theodor Adorno, whose seminal
study Die Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectic of Enlightenment) was written
during the American exile in 1944 in collaboration with Max Horkheimer.

In his later work, notably in the Aesthetic Theory, Adorno explores the hid-
den 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 re-
versed 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 diffi-
cult to read and almost impossible to translate into English or any other
language,12 he has discovered an interesting mode of linking and reconcil-
ing 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 ex-
pounds 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 dia-
lectically linked to the idea of art as a product of society, a fait social. More-
over 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 trans-
ported 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 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.
13 Different perspectives and interesting views on this aspect of the Aesthetic Theory are
offered by the following collection of essays: Huhn, The Semblance.
14 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.”
334 Annette Simonis
ficial post-industrial society, which Adorno derogatively termed “Kultur-

industrie” (‘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 in-
complete 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 char-
acteristic 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 posi-
tive symbols of hope and transformed into aesthetic signs of utopian de-
sires.
In contemporary literature and theory the ethical dimension has be-
come 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 ro-
mantic concepts of the imagination. Thus Adorno’s notion of negativity is
strikingly similar to Keats’s concept of “negative capability,” as it is ex-
plained 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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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 self-
understanding and the American realities. In addition, the relative security
of the pre-war era gave way to the permanent threat of the nuclear apoca-
lypse, 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-under-
standing 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 re-
belled 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
338 Björn Minx
Heller’s Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 do not only digest

personal war experiences—Mailer was an infantryman in the pacific thea-
tre, Heller a bombardier in Italy and Vonnegut an infantryman in the Bat-
tle 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 sub-
stituted by the examination of America’s values and general ethical ques-
tions. The authors thus functionalize the context of the Second World
War in order to emphasize social injustices and to criticize certain institu-
tions, 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 prefer-
able 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 nov-
els 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 signifi-
cance 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 re-
fusal 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 ex-
tremely context-specific: “Situations are all highly concrete and they don’t
present themselves with duty labels on them. Without the abilities of per-
ception, 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.
Literature and Ethics: Social Critique and Morality in the American War II Novel 339
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, exam-
ple for the importance to perceive a particular context sensitively. Percep-
tion is the key to establish a hierarchy between conflicting moral princi-
ples. And this hierarchy has to be redefined over and over again depend-
ing 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 narra-
tives. Martha Nussbaum argues that this is why authors are often fellow
fighters and moral leaders in the fight against obtuseness and for the re-
finement of perception (cf. 527). Within the wide field of literature it is the
novel which is especially suited for this struggle because novels are capa-
ble to illustrate complex situations and characters simply by telling a long
story! The reader can thus examine the particulars of the fictional situa-
tions and characters. In other words, novels are a test run for moral atten-
tion and the refinement of perception. Through novels, experience can be
supplemented or anticipated, and context-specific perception can be prac-
ticed. 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 Nuss-
baum 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 preci-
sion and imaginative diversity. Novels help us to see “(1) the effects of
social practices and institutions and (2) the effects of our private idiosyn-
crasies 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-
340 Björn Minx
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 per-
sons 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 emo-
tionally—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 story-
telling 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 ex-
plicitly the problem of someone trying to impose orderliness on some-
body 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 con-
vince 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 dis-
semination 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
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 col-
lective 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 re-
ceived 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 moral-
ity. Mailer’s, Heller’s and Vonnegut’s novels are without exception ex-
tremely 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 publi-
cation of Slaughterhouse 5 in 1969 was a literary event which made its au-
thor 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 cogni-
tive 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 re-
cipients can experience (cf. Clemen 13). They can be consciously antici-
pated by the author and used for his aims. I will continue with a presenta-
tion of the several strategies that the three authors employed to control
these reactions. For reasons of space I should concentrate on what I be-
lieve to be the main points of critique and the most important strategies
used to voice this critique implicitly.
342 Björn Minx
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 Gen-
eral Edward Cummings, conquers the island of Anopopei, occupied by
the Japanese. In its realistic-naturalistic style the novel is not only a de-
tailed study of the hardships of war but also of the American society of
the 1930s and 1940s. The heterogeneity of the social, religious, geographi-
cal and economic backgrounds of its characters—a representative cross-
range 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 rela-
tionship between origin and societal status of his characters. There is a
clear parallelism between status in the army and status in the pre-war soci-
ety of every single one of his characters. Mailer makes a clear distinction
between the enlisted men and the officers. Without exception, all the offi-
cers were born into bourgeois, influential and financially privileged fami-
lies, and they all went to college. In the Army they enjoy a disproportion-
ate 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 re-
marks, 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
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 conscious-
ness 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 deter-
mines intellectual possibilities and material success in life. Mailer thus
exposes America as a place of social privilege and as land of limited possi-
bilities 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 influ-
ence 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 repre-
sentative 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 indi-
vidual, 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 di-
recting the reader’s benevolence towards them and offering him the op-
portunity 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
344 Björn Minx
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 interde-
pendence of the men in their antagonism with Cummings and Croft.
So Mailer has Hearn killed and arranges for Valsen’s complete hu-
miliation at the hands of Croft. In doing so, the author implicitly commu-
nicates 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 reactionar-
ies. (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 individ-
ual. Their attitudes towards life are therefore not suitable for the chal-
lenges 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 ac-
tively. 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 imple-
mentation, creating something Diana Trilling has called “conscious barba-
rism” (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-
riors who only think of their own well-being, not hesitating to risk their
soldiers’ lives for completely senseless endeavors such as getting neat ae-
rial photographs of exploding bombs. They can legitimize their behavior
by referring to the regulation Catch-22 which basically says that the mili-
tary 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, injus-
tice 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 Amer-
ica. 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:
346 Björn Minx
‘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 hap-
pened 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 struc-
ture 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 in-
tended 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 ex-
tremely 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
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 pas-
sage 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 ar-
rangement 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 impres-
sion 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 hilari-
ous, may be a bit bizarre but not threatening or criminal. And even the
moral center Yossarian treats him with “laughing amazement and admira-
tion” (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, helicop-
ters or farming subsidies suggest that the author has designed the novel as
satirical counterpart of the real 1950s. He deplores that the new military-
industrial 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 cau-
tions us. According to the author, patriotism and profit-seeking are par-
ticularly questionable when they are used to enforce dubious goals or
when they serve only the interests of those who demand it. Heller identi-
fies such characteristics as boundless greed and ambition, power-seeking,
hypocrisy, self-righteousness, opportunism, irresponsibility and unscru-
pulousness 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.
348 Björn Minx
3. Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse 5, published in 1969, is a novel that tries to digest the fire-

bombing 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 out-
fitting him with a morally questionable attitude towards life. Again, as in
Mailer’s and Heller’s novels, the course of plot and the character concep-
tion 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 fire-
bombing 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 Tral-
famadorians. 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 com-
plete 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 ac-
cepts everything that happens around him with stoic equanimity, including
the social turmoil and the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the assassi-
nations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and above all, the
Vietnam War, to which he has got no objections. It is exactly this indiffer-
ent 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 in-
deed clear parallels in the biographies of Vonnegut and Pilgrim that ini-
tially 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 in-
difference. 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.
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 Vonne-
gut 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 inap-
propriate for us Earthlings, thereby also repudiating Billy’s philosophical
world. The first thing is that, unlike the Tralfamadorian clumps of sym-
bols, 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 tar-
get 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
350 Björn Minx
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 Earth-
ling, 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 in-
volved in the implicit dissemination of values: the blending of fact and
fiction and his excessive use of intertextual references. Vonnegut incorpo-
rates quotes and text passages from history books, documentaries, epi-
taphs, 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 com-
manded 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 Tral-
famadorians 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 justifi-
cation 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 differ-
ence” (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
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 atti-
tude and suggests thereby that there ARE indeed aspects of contemporary
life that can be changed—if we are courageous. All the atrocities and in-
justices 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 soli-
darity. 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 increas-
ing 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 invit-
ing 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 charac-
teristics of war: the everyday life of the soldiers, physical and psychic ex-
haustion, fear, trauma, combat operations, injury and death. Catch-22 and
Slaughterhouse 5 also cover these basic features of war but Heller and Von-
negut 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, docu-
mentary tone, Heller’s excessive use of irony, satire and black humor and
352 Björn Minx
Vonnegut’s seemingly indifferent style of narration are all different an-

swers 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 move-
ment 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, how-
ever, 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 in-
deed fellow fighters in the fight against moral obtuseness and for the re-
finement 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 Indiffer-
ence.” Essays in Literature 8.1 (1981): 45-51.
Clemen, Wolfgang. “Überlegungen zur Untersuchbarkeit von Sympa-
thielenkung in Shakespeares Dramen.” Sympathielenkung in den
Dramen Shakespeares. Eds. Werner Habicht and Ina Schabert. Mu-
nich: 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 Ha-
ven: College & University P, 1971.
Heller, Joseph. Catch-22. London: Vintage, 1994 [1961].
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 Li-
brary, 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 Viet-
nam.” Indian Journal of American Studies 14.2 (1984): 73-80.
Nussbaum, Martha. “‘Finely Aware and Richly Responsible’: Moral At-
tention 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 Gra-
ham Swift, Stef Craps points out how Linda Hutcheon’s adscription of
Waterland to the category of “historiographic metafiction” in her im-
mensely 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 con-
cerned 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 nov-
els, Flaubert’s Parrot and A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, are usually
approached as paradigmatic examples of British historiographic metafic-
tion.
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 over-
whelming 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.
356 Susana Onega
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 narrator-
characters, providing them with a psychological motivation for their com-
pulsion to negate the unbearable facts of the past and to invent compen-
satory narratives of wholeness. As Higdon notes, the psychological strug-
gle 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 de-
scribes 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 un-
suitable 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 de-
sire 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 revi-
sionist historical fiction as an ethically valid form of postmodern historical
fiction on the one hand, and historiographic metafiction as ethically my-
opic 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 at-
tempt to demonstrate that ethics is a major issue in this type of postmod-
Nightmare of History, Value of Art and Ethics of Love 357
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 differ-
ent from revisionist novels in that they are not fuelled by the attempt “to
re-write ‘official’ history from the perspective of its victims,” an assump-
tion 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 spe-
cies 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 initi-
ated 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).
358 Susana Onega
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. Con-
sequently, 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 au-
thor 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.
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 hand-
ling 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 indi-
viduation and wisdom, but rather a terrifying and purposeless vicious
circle of endurance against the backdrop of terrorism and the fear of nu-
clear 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 pur-
sued their systematic programmes of extermination, combined with the knowl-
edge of the huge power of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Na-
gasaki, 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 unthink-
ability, must be made actual in imagination in order to remain purely po-
tential in fact” (200, 201).
Connor’s remark reinforces Higdon’s contention that formal experi-
mentation 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.
360 Susana Onega
ture,” contemporary society struggles under “the impact of specific his-

torical 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” (souf-
france à distance)” (258). Consequently, “hurt, striking deeper than we real-
ize, 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 recog-
nition of our inadequacy in expressing pain: “If there is a failure of lan-
guage, resulting in silence or mutism, then no working through, no cathar-
sis, is possible. Literary verbalization, however, still remains a basis for
making the wound perceivable and the silence audible” (ibid.). The frag-
mentariness and palimpsestic structure of A History of the World, its as-
sumption 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 verbal-
ize 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 mo-
ments, 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 defin-
ing 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 On this, see Vanessa Guignery’s “Palimpseste et pastiche génériques chez Julian Barnes”
4052.
6 “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.”
sary,” “an excrescence, a monstrosity, some tardy addition to the [evolu-

tionary] 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 his-
tory 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 chin-
out 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 self-
enclosed 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 re-
jects history’s reduction of the discovery of America to a two-line descrip-
tion 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-narra-
tives 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 alterna-
tive Histories of the World, by filling some of the gaps left in Biblical and
World History with similarly marginal stories of fear, violence, loveless-
ness, 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).
362 Susana Onega
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 signifi-
cantly 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 eschato-
logical 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 con-
frontation, 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 wood-
worm’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
terms really stand for “edible” and “unedible” (10, 11). The division sub-
sequently 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 repre-
sentable.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 kill-
ing and eating each other. Or also, in Chapter 7, “Three Simple Stories,”
where the third is the story of the transatlantic journey of several hun-
dreds 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 coun-
tries, after having been denied asylum in Cuba, the US and Britain (181-
88).
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 beau-
tiful 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 spe-
cies, 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 Vase-
line 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 J. M. Coetzee uses the same method of substitution to similar effects in The Lives of Ani-
mals.
9 “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, expansion-
ism, racism” (55).
364 Susana Onega
Fables are whimsical stories, often originally invented to amuse chil-

dren, 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 enti-
tled 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 har-
monically: “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 nec-
essary (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 im-
portant 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 progres-
sively 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
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 sur-
prised 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 dis-
solution 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, in-
stead of taking the ethical worries of Barnes’s narrator as evidence that
historiographic metafiction is not necessarily “ethically myopic”, she pre-
fers 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] ac-
cept 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-
366 Susana Onega
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#au-
thorstatement (27.11.2007)
—: 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 Gra-
ham 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 His-
tory 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 Di-
mensions in British Historiographic Metafiction: Julian Barnes, Graham
Swift, Penelope Lively (Studies in English Literary and Cultural His-
tory). 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.
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 post-
modernism.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 noncha-
lance 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 het-
erodiegetic 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 happen-
ing on the level of the story, their analyses of the characters’ motives pro-
vide further enlightenment, poetic justice makes sure that the good char-
acters are rewarded in the end, and the just distribution of sympathy—
_____________
1 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 postmodern-
ism 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).
2 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.
3 See Ermarth (65-92).
370 Vera Nünning
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 ap-
propriately 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 “distri-
bution 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 par-
ody 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 de-
familiarization, metafictional commentary or the presentation of the gro-
tesque initiate an experience of alterity:
If multiplicity, heterogeneity or alterity are the predominant features of this pe-
riod, 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 develop-
ment 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 ques-
tion is, however, whether this appreciation can be brought about by feel-
ing 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.
Ethics and Aesthetics in British Novels at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century 371
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 be-
ings 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 detri-
mental effects; he therefore criticizes “those who have been so vigorously
concerned for the liberation of the group in attacking stereotypical preju-
dices [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 strong-
est motives for moral action” (Butler 69; emphasis by Butler).6 If we fol-
low 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 other-
ness, to refrain from stereotyping as well as categorizing others and to
_____________
5 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).
6 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 eth-
ics of difference (see Ette 199-242, 378-426).
372 Vera Nünning
abandon the insistence on closure, would be a great achievement. The

exposure to alterity and indeterminacy, which is a hallmark of postmod-
ernist 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 re-
frain from using the defamiliarizing devices of postmodernism. The ex-
perience 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 ac-
ceptance, 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 repre-
sentation of key characters allows us to feel empathy with them and to
develop an understanding of and sympathy for different, even contradic-
tory viewpoints, which renders it more difficult to condemn their limita-
tions. 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 con-
centrate on a character’s view of the world which is not corrected, evalu-
ated 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).
“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 Sui-
cide 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 con-
ventions. The fact that some novelists, who in the 1970s and 1980s em-
ployed “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, authentic-
ity, 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 Because of the use of the genre conventions of detective fiction and the pronounced
fragmentation, however, the novel also sports some postmodernist features.
9 Cf. Connor (10).
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 con-
cerning key Victorian beliefs were well on their way.
374 Vera Nünning
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 cate-
chism, 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, in-
structed 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 con-
trary, 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 sub-
jected to different kinds of racism; he is harassed by the police and ulti-
mately 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.).
father is declared “mad” and removed to a hospital when his mother can-
not 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 un-
gainly 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 de-
familiarizing devices, the reader is exposed to an experience of alterity.
This experience is double-layered: First, it relates to the experiences, val-
ues 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 dis-
tance between today’s readers and the famous author is heightened by
archaisms and circumlocutions which, as one reviewer stressed, “are en-
tirely 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 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 Ar-
thur. 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.
13 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
376 Vera Nünning
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 men-
tioned 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 dif-
ferent 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 wit-
nesses 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 infor-
mation, of techniques to evoke sympathy?16 Arthur was convinced that
_____________
something is going on.’ He [George] wasn’t as clean as that, maybe. On the other hand,
maybe he was” (Hanks n. pag.).
14 “[I]f his story was subtly changing around him, then so too were some of the characters”
(123).
15 Barnes only rejected “Conviction” as a title because it was too close to McEwan’s Atone-
ment (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.).
16 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
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 imagin-
able, is willing to wave evidence when it comes to believing what Sir Ar-
thur 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 evi-
dence 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 for-
mer 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 explic-
itly 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 im-
plies 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 fu-
ture, 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?
_____________
confirms that George “is a first-class witness. It is not his fault if he is unable to see what
others can” (217).
17 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.
378 Vera Nünning
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 “multi-
perspective” 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 com-
mon ground between readers and narrators is enhanced by the remoteness
and strangeness of the setting. Sarah Water’s Fingersmith (2002), for in-
stance, 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 nine-
teenth 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 in-
terpretations are understandable: because of their illnesses and the inferi-
ority 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.
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 in-
stances, a final reckoning seems to be impossible.
The multiperspective form of these novels, which juxtaposes several
narrators and highlights indeterminacy, has ethical implications. The diffi-
culties 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 indi-
viduals. The immediacy of the narrators’ thoughts and feelings, which is
not impeded by the presence of a mediating heterodiegetic narrator, al-
lows 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 be-
come more complex when the question of the reliability of these narrators
is foregrounded. Unreliable narration is per se a problematic narrative de-
vice as far as the ethics of a novel are concerned. After all, unreliable nar-
rators 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 be-
comes 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 hope-
lessly inadequate” (158). Since the early 1960s, a lot of research has been done on the tex-
tual 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 ba-
sis 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
380 Vera Nünning
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 vehi-
cle for ethics, because it evokes an experience of alterity. In addition to
that, the exposure to morally questionable views—and their fictional con-
sequences—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 ac-
ceptable and which not; and secondly, the distinction between the (sup-
posedly moral) readers and the (morally questionable) narrator becomes
obscure. It might be possible to recognize that seemingly radically differ-
_____________
probably find nothing wrong with the behavior of the notorious Humbert Humbert in Lo-
lita.
20 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 nar-
rator John Self in the novel Money, however, even Diedrick supposes that, in spite of them-
selves, most readers will “warm to him,” while few “will experience Self merely as a
monster of wretched excess” (74).
21 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 narra-
tion. He also mentions that Graham Swift’s stories and novels “both foreground and chal-
lenge 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” be-
cause of this, or “reliable” because of the insight he allows us into his feelings and delu-
sions. The novels I will deal with here, however, demonstrate that evaluations of unreli-
ability 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.
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 Hum-
bert 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 Eng-
land, 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 con-
centrate on the ethical unreliability of the narrators.
382 Vera Nünning
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 ill-
founded 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 ethi-
cally reliable character (she worries about having lied to her son, though
he is unable to understand anything she says), is unreliable in some re-
spects. When she describes her first meeting with the American JJ, she
involuntarily gives us insights into the prejudices which cloud her under-
standing:
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 incom-
patibility 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’ at-
titudes 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 collo-
quial” (n. pag.).
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 communi-
cative bond, which makes it easier for readers to understand the charac-
ters.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 empha-
sizes the common ground between self and other. He evokes the experi-
ence 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.
384 Vera Nünning
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 42-
year 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 omi-
nous 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 Ste-
vens in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989), with whom Bar-
bara 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 unintention-
ally 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.
So far, the use of unreliable narration is rather conventional. It be-

comes 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 an-
swer he gives to the reporters, saying that he “fancied” Sheba. But al-
though 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 be-
lieve 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 16-
year 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 be-
neath them, she eagerly suggested that they could move to the bed if he was uncomfort-
able. But Connolly shook his head. He wasn’t uncomfortable, he said. He just didn’t want
to stain the carpet” (ibid.).
386 Vera Nünning
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 in-
volved 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 redeem-
ing features which might induce readers to feel pity or sympathy with her,
and her ruthlessness in trying to break into Sheba’s life probably neutral-
izes 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 perpe-
trator, 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. Dur-
ing the course of the novel, when the reader learns to look through Bar-
bara’s motives and to evaluate Steven’s behavior, Sheba seems to be a
_____________
26 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.”
27 As Susan Tranter commented with regard to Barbara: “Heller’s art is to then subtly reverse
our loyalties” (n. pag.).
victim, who is, moreover, abandoned by her husband and children. While
this may induce a feeling of sympathy with Sheba, the reader has to re-
assess 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-judg-
ment is impossible.
6. Conclusion
Although the novels which have been discussed do not sport any “post-
modern” 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. Nonethe-
less, 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 postmod-
ernist techniques does not necessarily imply any antipathy towards ex-
periments, however. Instead, the creative use of modernist and realist
narrative conventions can fulfill some of the key functions of postmod-
ernist 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 com-
bination 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.
388 Vera Nünning
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 litera-
ture. 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 com-
plex 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 focaliz-
ers or narrators, the protagonists expose contemporary readers to strange
thought processes. This is most obvious in Nick Hornby’s suicidal char-
acters 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 alter-
ity 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 sup-
posed 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 ex-
perience of alterity with the feeling of sympathy, they bridge the gap be-
tween 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 de-
veloping 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
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 experi-
ence of alterity is linked to both destabilization and the evocation of sym-
pathy, 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 com-
bining aspects of realist and postmodernist aesthetics: connecting the
realist evocation of sympathy with life-like characters with the postmod-
ernist experience of alterity, indeterminacy and instability, they have pro-
duced an ethically viable aesthetics that is in tune with present-day life.
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Notes on Contributors
MARSHALL BROWN is Professor of Comparative Literature at the Univer-
sity 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 In-
ternational Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) and a part-
time post as a research assistant to Professor Ansgar Nünning. His doc-
toral 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 Uni-

versity of Wuppertal. Her main fields of interest are British literary and
cultural history, cultural memory studies, postcolonial studies, media the-
ory, and narratology. Publications include Gedächtnisromane (2003); Kollek-
tives 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 Interdisci-
plinary 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-meta-
phor, 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 Con-
tinuity in English Studies: A Critical Jubilee (2001); Literary History/Cultural
394 Notes on Contributors
History: Force-Fields and Tensions (2001); Literature, Literary History, and Cul-
tural 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 Ex-
ecutive Board of the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Cul-
ture (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 theo-
ries 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 re-
search interest is literary theory. She has written extensively on Shake-
speare and Renaissance culture and literature. Her publications also in-
clude 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 Uni-
versity Giessen.
WOLFGANG G. MÜLLER holds the chair of English Literature at the Frie-

drich 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) Shake-
speare 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-
Notes on Contributors 395
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 charac-
ters in different texts, a phenomenon he calls “interfigurality,” 1991); (7)
the letter as a genre (articles); and (8) history of the English novel. A re-
cent research project is devoted to the construction of an ethical narratol-
ogy, 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 alter-
ity, 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 Litera-

ture and Cultural Studies at Justus Liebig University Giessen since 1996.
He is the founding director of the “Giessener Graduiertenzentrum Kul-
turwissenschaften” (GGK) and of the International Graduate Centre for
the Study of Culture (GCSC) as well as the academic director of the Inter-
national 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, cul-
tures 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 Literaturwissen-
schaft (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 Angli-
stik/Amerikanistik, Uni Wissen Kernkompetenzen; WVT-Handbücher zum lite-
raturwissenschaftlichen Studium; MCM: Media & Cultural Memory/Medien &
kulturelle Erinnerung (with Astrid Erll); ELCH: English Literary and Cultural
History (with Vera Nünning), and WVT-Handbücher zur Literatur- und Kul-
turdidaktik (with Wolfgang Hallet).
VERA NÜNNING holds a chair of English Literature at Ruprecht Karls

University Heidelberg. Since 2006 she has been Vice-Rector for interna-
tional 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 Nün-
ning, 1998); Der englische Roman des 19. Jahrhunderts (2000); Grundkurs angli-
stisch-amerikanistische Literaturwissenschaft (with Ansgar Nünning, 2001). To-
gether with Ansgar Nünning she has edited several collections of essays,
among them three on narratology (2002; 2004), and Konzepte der Kulturwis-
senschaften (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 impe-
rialism, 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 contem-
porary 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 Compo-
nent in Experimental British Fiction since the 1960’s (2007).
JAN RUPP is a doctoral student at Justus Liebig University Giessen, work-

ing on the connection between genre and cultural memory in Black British
literature. He is also involved in a research project on imperialist self-
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 stud-
ied 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 Impres-
sionism, 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 Interna-
tional 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 representa-
tions of emotions. Among his recent publications are London, The Metropo-
lis (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 Univer-

sité 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 Ang-
laises, Philosophy and Literature, and EJES on topics such as fiction and cog-
nition, 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-
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 Ne-
gro,” REAL 16 (2000); “Race and Culture: Taine’s Vision of English Ren-
naissance 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’ His-
tory 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 publica-
tions 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); Grenz-
überschreitungen 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 En-
glish at a secondary school (“Integrierte Gesamtschule”) in Rödermark
near Frankfurt (as a full-time “Studienrat”). He is the author of Die Ästhe-
tik 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, Nanotechnolo-
gie, 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.
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); Ameri-
kanische 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).

Ethics in Culture

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Ethics in Culture

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Ethics in Culture

Herausgegeben von / Edited by

Wissenschaftlicher Beirat / Editorial Board

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ethics in culture : the dissemination of values through literature and

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

Giessen, December 2007

I. Theory Supported by History

II. History Inspiring Theory

ANSGAR NÜNNING, JAN RUPP

Notes on Contributors ……………………………...………………. 393

One of the most fascinating phenomena one encounters in the study of

metaethical level, during this conscious experience of the nature of

In order to demonstrate how literature can be ethical in this sense, she

“because of its aesthetic defamiliarization and uncontrollable imaginative

architecture’ became an integral part of the imperial project in the nine-

Booth, Wayne C. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: U of

Keulartz, Jozef. Pragmatist Ethics for a Technological Culture. Dordrecht:

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

1.2 The Changing Rhetoric of Moral Purpose: Intention or Tension?

The letter of “Introduction” to this Symposium suggests, among several

tality of texts, and ultimately enhance the ethical relevance of literature,

2.1 Rule and Example: Orthodoxy as Virtue

Let me return to Shelley. His A Defence of Poetry clearly represents, on the

irony in defending Comedies and Tragedies against bigotry is also truly

2.2 Imagination and Ludic Energy

resides in this effect. No supplementary, intentional “use” of poetry is

3. The Contemporary Debate: Criticality and Community

text-specific without being relativistic, in which we get potentially universalizable

videogame can certainly be enjoyable, and improve one’s immediate reac-

Without falling into the trap of a narrowly content-based and merely

Eaglestone, Robert. “Navigating an Ancient Problem: Ethics and Litera-

Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-moral Sense.”

Being Ethical: Open, Less Open, and Hidden Dissemination

It is a truth universally acknowledged that hardly anyone wants to be preached

source of examples and an educational medium for moral behavior. De-

like fictionality, aesthetic quality or literariness play no role in his argu-

that fundamentally alters our notion of individual autonomy.2 This latter

to the ethical significance of a more general and formal development of

above all presents “Ethical Encounters with Alterity,” Kotte attempts to

“the mnemonic and historical responsiveness of literature”, which permits

I have looked at a considerable number of more successful works from

aces, an era’s crown,” or in Cecil Day Lewis’s “Newsreel” from 1938.

Transcendental Ethics, Vertical Ethics, and Horizontal Ethics

Wenn man durchaus will, ist jeder deplaciert.

customs, expectations, habits of thought, modes of behavior. Vertical

limited allegories, as I shall be illustrating.) Here, for instance, is the wed-

the stairs, she heard Coupeau’s song” (489). Commerce, responsibility,

Habermas, Jürgen. Moralbewußtsein und kommunikatives Handeln. Frankfurt a.

Taylor, Charles. Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991.

Agrammaticality, Silence and the Diffusion of Values:

1. Introduction: Language on Holiday

What follows will be a series of mixed remarks on ethics and literature—I

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

2. Wittgenstein and Literary Theory, or from “Dichtung” to “Ducting”

Wittgenstein gave us no literary theory but a general emphasis on the

guage of information, is not used in the language-game of giving informa-

standing what is already before our eyes. This vision of Wittgensteinian

take”—a concept that will allow me to develop an esthetics of agrammati-