Nick Harris
Blog June 21, 2024
The Turn to Ethics and Affect
The critical
reader observes how in my previous post “Immediacy Put into Practice” on Thomas
Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, or at least one chapter of it, can easily be compared
to close reading of text and how such close reading reflects the text as a
whole. Such parsing, if we can call the process by that name, is common in
poetry reading, but in larger prosaic works proves problematic simply because
of how to choose which portion of the text the critic will examine. Usually, an
early chapter will set a tone that the rest of the book will follow, but not
necessarily. Followers of the history of Postmodernism may immediately go to
the idea of “deconstruction,” Jacques Derrida’s examination of extreme close
reading as a determinant of the ideas behind the text. Though influential at
the time of the decade of the 1980s, deconstruction has reached a certain limit
due to the nature of such close reading’s questionable end results as relative
to the theme of the work. Deconstruction reaches into topics beyond literary
theory such as fine arts and hard science, and in these areas, the relevancy of
close reading can often come out as comical. One can write about “The Tao of
Physics” for decades and still have the splitting of the atom into quarks to
deal with on a practical level, or at least the search for the reality behind
such quantum physics, a reality that threatens to destroy the planet at any
given moment (see the example of Christopher Norris, 1998).. So, the critic today wants to turn to other historical
progressions from Barthes and Sontag’s pop culture immediacy in order to
ascertain their relevance beyond the close reading of literary texts. One such
development also occurred in the decade of he 1980s and from a questionable
progression of ideas, those of ethics and literature.
According
to Wayne C. Booth’s The Company We Keep, the search for ethics in
literature before the 1980’s had the name “the affective fallacy” and was
generally discredited in the literary theory community (p.4). Since the 1990’s a
“turn” has occurred which takes the basic ideas of ethics and literature out of
“fallacy” mode, making not only a “turn to ethics” possible, but also,
eventually, a turn to the psychological goodness of “affect” in literature as a
means towards individual happiness and therefore an added relevance to the
entire reading process.
But Booth points out the questionable origins of this turn to
ethics as a means toward manipulation of educational texts. Booth writes:
The
concern for an ethical criticism of texts arose in the 1980s
in
part due to several objections to the readings of American texts from
the
nineteenth century which used words and phrases of a racial pejorative
character.
Chief among these is the use of
Huckleberry Finn by Samuel
Clemens,
which had been a popular text for collegiate use for over a
century.
Such concerns led to other ethical
boundaries which various organizations claimed needed to be kept in check,
often resulting in what amounted to book banning in schools by both
conservative forces and progressive forces wishing to change societal attitudes
toward the disenfranchised. Booth’s conclusion: “Anyone who attempts to invite
ethical criticism back into the front parlor, to join more fashionable, less
threatening varieties, must know from the beginning that no simple, definitive
conclusions lie ahead” (pp 4-5). No simple conclusions are a truth that has
haunted readers before these concerns and afterwards.
Critics had to take a look at the issue from the
perspective of classical philosophy to step the literary criticism toward a
more positive direction. The work of philosophers such as Marth C. Nussbaum and
Rochard Rorty has advanced the concern of ethics and literature into a more
positive realm. We base this positivity mostly on Aristotlean concerns for how art
has an effect upon the individual. Selections from
Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought: The
Intelligence of Emotions from 2001 show this turn to the formation of
individual morality as an important aspect of critical reading. From the
“Introduction,” Nussbaum writes, “Instead of viewing morality as a system of
principles to be grasped by a detached intellect, and emotions as motivations
that either support or subvert our choice to act according to principle, we
will have to consider emotions as part and parcel of the system of ethical
reasoning” (1). Nussbaum’s insistence on compassion as an element of reading
brings the critic closer to embracing the idea of “affect” – an embracement
which before this turn to ethics had been derided, possibly because of a
Platonian, logical viewpoint that critics had held in perpetuity.
About this progression of ideas from the counterculture
insistence on immediacy, critics can now see beyond the further limitations of
deconstruction as we delve into the ethereality of an Aristotlean doctrine of “Ethos.”
Other critics can hold with deconstruction. Still others keep the modernist
insistence on structuralism alive, and, indeed, the equation of structure with deconstruction is easily observed
even if the words might be antonymic in nature. But in terms of the spirit of
the counterculture, that the critic, the reader, needs to have a freedom to
develop ideas as they are presented on a moment-to-moment basis, we can now
turn to ethics and affect in our search for how to show the continued relevancy
of reading in an increasingly dehumanized world.
References
Booth,
Wayne C. The Company We Keep. University
of California Press,1988.
Norris, Christopher. "On the Limits of
"Undecidability": Quantum Physics, Deconstruction, and
Anti-realism." The Yale Journal of Criticism, vol. 11 no. 2,
1998, p. 407-432. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/yale.1998.a36808.
Nussbaum, Martha C. “Introduction.”
in Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence
of Emotions. Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 1-14.
The quantum image is a
copyright-free reproduction from Istock Getty Images.
