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