Ethics and Literature: The Road from Semiotics to the “Turn”

 

A contemporary reader finds problems in determining a timeline between semiotics as practiced by Roland Barthes and previously investigated in my blogs and the burgeoning ethics and literature debate, the so-called “Turn to Ethics.” The reader can make no easy connection, so one may wonder why any critic would search for such an evolution. But in my recent blogs attempting explanations of Barthes’ “Mythologies,” I have laid the groundwork for creating such a connection. The early semiotics of Barthes and his American champion Susan Sontag hold a colonel of what Jean-Francios Lyotard would in 1979 term “Postmodernism,” the abandonment of large philosophical schools for smaller, more detailed, and immediate concerns. The development of an ethics and literature connection must, by definition, explore individual moments within narratives in order to determine what ethical centers connect aesthetic concerns, especially literary ones, to definitions of good and bad.

            One chief proponent of this turn to ethical considerations is the critic Wayne C. Booth. As explained in Stiles and Harris, 2009, Booth’s theories point out that the reader of a narrative will link the text to causes and impacts concerning the individual’s need to  “desire and fear, love and hate, emulate and spurn while reading on how those patterns then shape our character” (318). Booth’s initial explanation of the turn to ethics comes from his 1961 The Rhetoric of Fiction, a work heralded by Stiles and Harris as “a masterpiece” (312). But the specific ideas quoted above are heralded in what is perhaps Booth’s most influential study of ethics and literature, The Company We Keep from 1988. In this work Booth explores not only the relationship between reader and author, but between reader and implied author of the narrative. Whether that narrator is dependable or not, they become a sort of friend, a company which the reader keeps. In keeping company with the implied author, the reader must make personal decisions about the validity and the quality of goodness that the author is attempting to relate.

Booth is developing a standing tradition of American philosophy wherein aspects of religion and philosophy, ethical aspects especially, have a direct connection to literature and aesthetics. He relates his ideas to American pragmatic philosophy, especially the aesthetics of Santayana. Booth reaffirms the basic ideas of Santayana: “The relationships between literature, art, religion, and philosophy are prominent themes throughout Santayana’s writings” (Saatkamp and Coleman, Part 2). We can laud Booth for keeping these American pragmatic philosophy connections alive in the criticism of literature.

We can further respect Booth for keeping the ethics and literature connection viable during the 1980s, an age which portrays the concept of ethical literature taken to disreputable lengths through the practice of banning books. According to Booth’s The Company We Keep, organizations concerned with keeping a particular type of conservative Christian morality alive in American education carried the idea of ethical literature into the practice of taking objectionable books away from the eyes of young students (Introduction). This type of enforced morality might have been where the concept of ethics and literature ended if not for the concerns of literary critics such as Booth. Booth kept alive the search for connections between philosophy and the purpose of literature. He thus helps to answer the question of why literature has a purpose--or at least a purpose beyond simplistic entertainment through narratives. Though such entertainment can have merits in the philosophical search for happiness and the use of artistry to achieve it, we must continue the further investigation of ethics as a core value of literature and a purpose for its study.

By looking at Booth’s investigation of the core values of literature and ethics in the 1980s, we find a link between the pop-art concerns of the 1960s which would turn the reader away from modernist concepts of literary greatness to a more inclusive concept of the value of art, a concept that includes popular values. The instigation of symbols of popular culture as veritable in the world of aesthetics keeps alive the investigation of ethics and art, including literature, in the face of dogmatic censorship. The works of Booth reinforce when this connection.

The point here is that a link exists between the concerns of pop culture counter-culturalists of the 1960s and the consideration of ethics and literature that arose in the 1990s. We can find Booth lacking in some fundamental definitions of concepts such as the difference between his implied author and the concept of the unreliable narrator. He never clarifies. But studying Booth helps the contemporary critic see how the connections exist between the various eras of counterculture, the 1960s and the 1990s, even though those are decades when the counter-culture wanes.

The good news is that coming out of the other side of the 1980s is the work of philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum who shares Booth’s proclaimed Aristotlean values and applies them to the study of literature, and pragmatists such as Richard Rorty, further showing us how we validate the study of literature as a conduit of ethics and humanity. Thus, I find the popular semiotics of Barthes as a vital precursor of the contemporary world of literature and ethics. Not only is semiotics a precursor, but it is a philosophy we can incorporate into present-day criticism alongside the study of ethics and literature.

 

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Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. University of Chicago Press, 1961.

-----. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1988.

Lyotard, Jean-François. "Defining the Postmodern." ICA Documents4: Postmodernism. London: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1986. 6-8.

Saatkamp, Herman and Martin Coleman, "George Santayana", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2023/entries/santayana/

Stiles, Stefanie, and Randy Harris. “Keeping Curious Company:  Wayne C. Booth’s Friendship Model of Criticism and the Work of Hunter S. Thompson.” College English, Vol. 72, No. 4 (Mar. 2009), pp. 313-337. http://www/jstor.org/stable/25472331    

 

                                                                                    Nick Harris, April 26, 2024

                                                         “Operation Margarine”

Barthes’ mythologies are images of popular culture as emblematic of underlying cultural ideas. I have already looked at two of these “mythologies,” “The World of Wrestling” and “Romans in Film.” In another such short essay, “Operation Margarine,” Barthes likens the formation of societal constructs such as the military and the church to pop culture ideas of plasticity as shown by common household items such as margarine. “Astra” was the name of a popular brand of margarine in Barthes’ France that he uses in his commentary on society. Barthes’ short piece on margarine is further evidence of his preoccupation with gleaning symbols of social meaning, especially that of plasticity, from everyday items. Barthes termed these societal symbols “Mythologies.” Written for popular magazines, these short pieces appear in his 1957 collection appropriately entitled Mythologies . In many “Mythologies,” theatricality comes through as the predominant means of symbology. “The World of Wrestling” shows the live immediacy of theater in the pro-wrestling ring and “Romans in Film” shows the plasticity of the presentation of actors in films. But here, in “Astra,” the symbol is the plasticity of the item, the fact that margarine is a fake, a substitute for the real thing -- butter.

The imagery is significant for understanding the way we use signs and symbols today. These signs and symbols are reflective of the particular brand of postmodernism created by early postmodernists such as Barthes. In the modernism that preceded Barthes, the concerns of modern philosophy attempt to establish a proper canon of artistry. This canon lauds works it determines as artistic based on a largely structural approach. The modernist artist, the “great” artist, achieves her/his greatness through a strategic used of predisposed forms. The postmodernist, however, wants to incorporate the ideas of the common everyday culture into the philosophy of art and life. Thus Barthes, and his American champions such as Susan Sontag, abandon the restrictions of form and use the familiar literary device of the symbol. Something stands for something else. But Barthes and Sontag push the idea of symbol and signifier into a new light wherein the familiar image becomes a signifier of deeper cultural values. These are the “Mythologies.” Barthes creates this is the type of signification in “Operation Margarine” wherein the plasticity of margarine reflects the plasticity of religion and politics in contemporary society. Margarine helps us to understand Sontag’s battle cry: “The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have” (99). Until we consumers know that we have accepted something as a substantive substitute, we cannot fully shake off the cloud of knowledge which our current sense of Order gives to us and our capacity for immediate reaction lessens.

The basic conceit of margarine as a symbol concerns its substitution for something else, the real thing that is butter. By plasticizing butter, margarine is not quite the same thing as butter. But Barthes emphasizes that margarine is not necessarily bad. As a symbol, it still has merits, not as flavorful as the merits of butter, but nonetheless having a decent taste. Though at first decried as something horrific (“…margarine? Unthinkable!”), the consumer becomes aware of the value of the product: “…margarine is a delicious food, tasty, digestible, economical, useful in all circumstances. The moral at the end is well known: ‘Here you are, rid of a prejudice which cost you dearly!” (Mythologies, 42).

The symbol of societal attitude toward margarine becomes an insight into societal attitudes toward an ever-increasing critical view of politics and religion. The increasing awareness of the unthinkable things about politicians and religious figures that define our use of these societal constructs in the contemporary world becomes less odious with the salve of that which alleviates our prejudice against something at one time we may have thought unethical. “A little ‘confessed’ evil saves one from acknowledging a lot of hidden evil.” Furthermore, “What does it matter, after all, if Order is a little brutal or a little blind, when it allows us to live cheaply?” (Mythologies, 42). The margarine of the small confessions, the little brutalities, keeps the consumers satisfied, even though this margarine is not the real thing.

 

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Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. (1957) translated by Annette Lavers, New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.

Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation,” The Susan Sontag Reader. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1982. 95-104.

                                                                                                                        Nick Harris, April 19, 2024

 

                                    "The Romans in Film" according to Roland Barthes

Barthes defines the 1953 film Julius Ceasar as a primitive use of two signs to tell the audience what spectacle they are watching. The two signs are the Roman short-locked haircut and the sweat on the Roman faces. These two symbols tell the viewer everything they need to know about “Roman-ness” in the grand spectacle of a Hollywood version of Shakespeare. In the online world, we can look up pictures of John Gielgud as Cassius, the Devil on Brutus’ shoulder, to see what Barthes is talking about. The locks of the haircut fall short on the forehead, and the skin shines with what I suppose is sweat, at least Barthes interprets the glossiness in that way.

Barthes conclusion in his short examination of “The Romans in Film” is quite negative. “For although it is a good thing if a spectacle is created to make the world more explicit, it is both reprehensible and deceitful to confuse the sign with what is signified” (28).  This quote has two parts. Examining the first, we take in his presumption that “a spectacle is created to make the world more explicit.” From reading Barthes’ “The World of Wrestling,” the genesis piece of his Mythologies, we understand that the immediacy of spectacle is wondrous, a call back to the drama of ancient Greece, where symbol and signified have a pure relationship brought on by, among other things, the insistence of the masque telling us exactly what we need to have as our interpretation of the immediacy of the event.

The second part of Barthes’ sentence, however, tells us that the two symbols of the 1953 Julius Caesar  fall short of the wanted wonderment. The symbols fall so short as to be “reprehensible” and “deceitful.” Putting the coiffure on the actors gives them an instant representation that is untrue. The spectacle of Rome and the spectacle of Shakespeare is not in the haircut. The spectacle is in the action and the words. Likewise, the angst and emotion lies not in a plasticized sweat. Let Shakespeare’s words hit us with their punch and vigor. Let the actors show us what villains and heroes they are, complicated through their hesitance to do what they think good, or, in Antony’s case, to revolt against the terrorists in the way he knows he must.

And yet, the film gives us hairdos and reflections of soundstage lights on the faces of the actors. And we, the viewers, are supposed to swoon with the “fact” that the film shows us its spectacle. The signs have become what is the wanted intent, and that magnificent drama and emotion on its step-by-step basis that comprises the Shakespeare and his interpretation by the actors falls to second place. Film, if it chooses to, can create this imbalance. The balance is in the struggle within the characters as Antony approaches his victory. The wrestling of Brutus with Antony, both internal and external, is the balanced spectacle here, not their make-up.

Brutus as Antony approaches. Stock image from Alamy.

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Barthes, Roland. “The Romans in  Films.” Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers.  NY: Hill     and Wang, 1972, pp. 26-28.

"The World of Wrestling"

    Roland Barthes proclaims the “grandiloquence” of ancient theatres through their reliance on sunlight as the direct spotlighting of the emotions portrayed on stage. Barthes likens this spectacle to that of the world of professional wrestling: “The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess,” and “Even hidden in the most squalid Parisian halls, wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles” (15). The campiness and theatricality (Is it rigged?) of professional wrestling is secondary to this spectacle, what Barthes calls the art’s “primary virtue.” The “primary” quality he writes of is “to abolish all motives and all consequences.” Wrestling disconnects the responsibility of the audience member to any type of symbolic interference between the meaning of the theatre and its spectacle.

From the series - The Truth of Gestures -- Photographer: Douglass Dresher -- dfdresher  |  Sep 30, 2018. https://www.shutterbug.com/content/series-truth-gestures retrieved 4/3/24.

 

Susan Sontag shows how we can take the grandiloquence of theatre as shown in the world of wrestling and apply it to analysis of literature (or any art form, for that matter). This sense of immediacy is what she terms “Against Interpretation.” The method stresses the reader/viewer/listener’s immediate reaction to each moment of the artistic experience as belonging to itself, an expression of “not what it thinks but what it sees” (Barthes 15). Despite the dehumanizing of the audience member into an “it,” Barthes is respecting the visceral reaction of that audience member as having a validity in artistic expression.

 

This validity is especially significant when approaching literatures that some critics may interpret as lacking artistic value because they do not conform to norms of structuralist artistry as defined by the constructs of Modernism. Such genres as the mystery novel, the romance novel, and the horror genre may fit into this bracket. Structural artistry might be present in these genres – in fact, a certain formulaic quality of structure is undoubtedly welcomed. However the modernist construct of twisting and playing with the forms in order to achieve a certain sense of reassembly or putting the world back together in large overarching structures is not the purpose.

 

Rather, the purpose is the immediate visceral reaction. As Kristeva shows in The Power of Horror, the horror genre thrives due to its visceral reactions of disgust and revulsion, which she terms “abjection” (4). We can make the connection between abjection in horror and grandiloquence in professional wrestling by connecting Kristeva to Sontag’s sense of immediacy as aesthetically valuable to Barthe’s use of wrestling in the sphere of grand theater. Such a connection intersects with contemporary interpretations of gothic literature that emphasize the immediacy of the moment, even as the innocent victim slowly lurks down the spooky hallways, each moment an exercise in suspense for what is to come behind the locked door.

 

By turning to the figure of the innocent in gothic literature, we can circle back to Barthes. His interpretation of wrestling as grand theater becomes dependent on “the body of the wrestler that we find the first key to the contest” (17). The audience, seeing the first image of the wrestler as he enters the arena, sets up an expectation, usually grotesque and conforming to the anticipation of the spectacle to come. The body of the wrestler becomes a part of the immediacy of the grand moment.

 

By focusing on the body as the initial sign, Barthes points out that the entirety of viewing the wrestling experience becomes one of symbol, even though what we have initially thought is that the value of the theatre of wrestling is the absence of symbolic interference. But Barthes makes his conclusions based on the symbology of what the audience expects, both by the event itself and by the body of the wrestler that is at its center: “…what is expected is the intelligible representation of moral situations which are usually private. This emptying out of interiority to the benefit of its exterior signs, this exhaustion of the content by the form, is the very principle of triumphant classical art” (18). The paradox of Barthes is that he heralds the visceral art of a popular form like professional wrestling by showing that even this sense of immediate gratification depends on symbols that occur between the audience member and the event. The world is dependent on symbols even as we delight in experiences that attempt to eliminate a symbology that would put itself between the event and the viewer.

 

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Barthes, Roland.  “The World of Wrestling” in Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers.  NY: Hill     and Wang, 1972, pp. 15-25.

            Kristeva, Julia. “Powers of Horror: Approaching Abjection.” The Portable Kristeva. Editors Julia                         Kristeva and Kelly Oliver.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation.” The Susan Sontag Reader edited by Elizabeth Hardwick, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984, pp. 95-104.

 Reply to Jefferson Calico blog post "Can Horror Serve as Lament?"

In the blogger folder "I Watched and I Wondered" 3/25/24

https://beingviking.blogspot.com/2024/03/can-horror-serve-as-lament.html 

Dear Jefferson,

 

RE: Defining "Horror," per your recent blog.

 

Horace Walpole, in his introduction to his fantastical novel The Castle of Otranto (1764) gave us the word "Gothic" to define what would become the "horror" genre. He named his new style of novel after the architectural style of the titular castle. The fantastical element is based on folk and fairy tales of young women in danger from beastly husbands. This info is described in detail in Anne Williams' Art of Darkness (1995), the text I used to teach my gothic lit courses, and a text that defined scary literature (whatever you call it) in terms of feminism – the crafty innocent, usually a young woman, surviving her predicament through use of her own wits. The whole "final girl" concept is an outgrowth of this feminist gothicism, in my humble (arrogant?) opinion.

 

Ann Radcliff, in the years after Otranto, became very successful in the writing of Gothic novels, and most of hers held little or no supernatural elements, just young innocent females trying to escape from "monstrous" marriages in spooky circumstances.  She developed a fairly famous distinction between "Terror" and "horror," explained in a posthumous essay "On the Supernatural in Poetry" (1826). "Terror" is the feeling of suspense that leads up to a horrific event , whereas "horror" is the more visceral feeling of revulsion experienced at the moment of the event and afterward. She wrote novels of "Terror." 

 

Enh. I've always preferred the suspenseful to the blood-splattered immediacy of horror, and I often think of my favorite "horror" novels as those which might be called "Suspense" novels Perhaps Radcliffe followers would call them "Terror," but I think of them as "Horror."  To me, the best "horror" is the edge-of-your-seat page-turner such as "The Turn of the Screw" or The Haunting of Hill House – or Poe stories such as "The Fall of the House of Usher," which don't show their horror until the final page.

 

Julia Kristeva, in The Power of Horror, defines the chief quality of Radliffe's horror using the term "abjection." She defines "abjection" as that feeling of revulsion that results in a change in the body, such as nausea, screams, tears, elevated heart rate, fainting, or even something as simple as the reaction of turning away from the movie screen. "Abjection," I think, is the chief component of what you are calling "horror" in your essay – at least that's my interpretation. But then, I  tend to interpret  this whole "scary" family of genres in terms of Williams and Kristeva. My interpretation of them leads to (or perhaps derives from) the reconsideration of Roland Barthes' pop-art and Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation" which claims that artistry is valid when defined as moment-to-moment visceral reactions Art is just a valid in this philosophy as it is when forced into interpretation models such as structuralism (art is defined by its structure).

 

But even in this pop-art philosophy, the moment-to-moment enjoyment, to me, comes from each instant of suspense as it leads us to "what is going to happen next?!?" This is one reason I do not mind ambiguous endings, such as that of "The Turn of the Screw." Each moment is appreciated as an artistry on its own terms. We are propelled toward the end. But the fact that we do not know exactly what has happened leads to an even more enjoyable experience as we ponder over the possibilities, and therefore keep the suspense alive. Because there is a death at the end of the book (or is there?), the whole narrative of the governess becomes a lament. The ghosts (the former servants who have died before the story begins) are not lamented. They are feared. ..because they are trying to overtake the children. They do not succeed, largely because of the cunningness and bravery of the governess. But does she "win"?

 

Nick

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In a casual reply to my response to him,Dr. Calico wondered if my response is elitist. Am I putting"Horror" into a sub-category that is aesthetically "less" than the suspense that prefer?

In reflection, I think I am probably being elitist. But my elitism has rough edges.

In much of my content, I reference the work of Susan Sontag. She wrote about the notion of "Camp" or "Campiness" as having its own legitimacy in the aesthetic world. She also wrote of her own brand of what would one day be called "postmodernism" (though she never called it that) as an attack of the elitism of Modernism, a counter to the Modernist insistence on "Greatness" in art, chiefly through defining art as "Structure."

The trouble with her position, and it is a position I admire, is that it ends up as an elitist position itself. To single out any type of messaging that proclaims itself artistic is to create hierarchies proclaiming that one thing is "better" than another. This is the conundrum of Sontag.

The conundrum fits my remarks also. I must admit that my comments set up a hierarchy of genres, for I am naturally inclined to dislike viseral "horror" in relation to a steady psychological suspense, something I much prefer. The abjection of horror, the rough, nauseating uncomfortability of it, I find grotesque. That loathsomeness and horribleness, though I do not prefer it as a "Scare," is, I must admit, an emotional impact that makes it as equal an artistry as any other.

Still, I would much prefer a hundredth reread of "The Turn of the Screw" to trudging through any Zombie Apocalypse novel. That's me.