Ethics, Critics, Close Reading
Why a turn to ethics in Canadian criticism? One is hesitant to risk an answer, no matter how tentative, especially if one is neither officially nor yet sufficiently Canadian. For my part, I came from the States to Canada on Canada Day in the year of 2004. The timing was propitious. My first cross-cultural revelation was that Americans are arrogant and Canadians are smug. No doubt it was partially provoked by the Americans and Canadians I knew asking me too soon and too frequently about the differences between Canadians and Americans. It was imperative to say something and if it was pithy so much the better. After the inadequacy of my response sank in, I relaxed into more dialectical ways of thinking. Having left one country at a time of much sloganeering, I preferred to avoid entering the new one in the pseudo-intellectual bumper-sticker trade.
Nevertheless, there may be something about Canada conducive not only to writing an ethical criticism, but also to writing criticism that can deal with both ethics and aesthetics without getting too chippy about it. Such criticism is obviously possible elsewhere – indeed, one would hope, anywhere. Still, my initial impression is that the aesthetics/ethics divide is undivided here more or less satisfactorily; or perhaps it is merely (as another emigrant put it) pretty to think so. In this case, however, the prettiness of the assertion is not at odds with its veracity. One corollary to the surge of interest in ethics of late among many literary critics (not only those living in Canada) is a similar surge of interest in aesthetics. The coupling may seem odd, especially given that aesthetics and ethics are often pitched as antithetical. Then again, one cannot help feeling that the two are somehow connected. 'It may be true that one has to choose between ethics and aesthetics, but it is no less true that whichever one chooses, one will always find the other at the end of the road.' So Susan Sontag began her essay 'Godard,' quoting her subject (147). She and her subject were right, and in reflecting on the statement, one feels that it is as appropriate to literary criticism as to art.
One also feels, however, that here there is less a choosing between the two and more of a choosing to take them together. When I say 'here,' I mean Canada, of course. But it would be disingenuous not to specify further, for 'here' is also Toronto – which, as one is often reminded, is only a part of the whole – as well as the university that takes its name from the city. The specifics are relevant in several ways to the matters of aesthetics [End Page 926] and ethics I mean to discuss. First, there is the local, professional fact, for me at least, that when one moves to a new place and in one swoop gains a new group of colleagues, one hastens his intellectual and even personal acclimation by reading the work of those colleagues; indeed, such a subjective course of reading has made possible the following speculations. I hope that the brief discussion of the work of some of those colleagues will be taken not as cliquishness, but as a legitimate response to a new environment. Second, staying with the local and professional but growing less subjective, there is the fact of the centrality, not only at the University of Toronto but also in Canadian cultural life, of Northrop Frye, whose influence as a mediatory figure in the putative ethics/aesthetics divide can still be ascertained. Third, there is a fact that I will not belabour but will merely conclude by remarking upon, namely, that this place, this city, this country is experiencing a rich period of immigration, one that is being theorized while it is happening, as well as one that suggests practical models for letting the ethics we adhere to and the art that we create...
