Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction: Narratives of Cultural Remission (review)

Leona Toker aspires to provide a topology of forms that may be elicited by ethics within fiction, at least within modern Western narratives. Through readings of canonical, mostly English-language writers (Hawthorne, Fielding, Sterne, Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, Conrad, Joyce, Kafka, and Salamov), Toker seeks to correlate degrees of carnivalization (in Bakhtin’s sense) with varying relations between the ethical and what Toker calls “cultural remission.” Toker argues that culture is a “system of relationships that mediates between individuals and their world,” a system that “evolves more slowly than the conditions that it processes,” so that “cultural patterns tend to become inimical to individual life” (1). She then suggests a variety of “correctives,” among them “aesthetic experience,” which, when not just “complacent” or didactic, functions as a “‘time-out’ from the consolidation of sociocultural determinacies, a space of inner freedom,” and thus operates as “cultural remission” (1).

Associating the aesthetic with “reprieve from social interaction, from needs of survival and pressures of self-advancement” (3), Toker maintains that there is a drift towards self-complacency or self-certainty within aesthetic “time-outs” that themselves need correction from textual “ethical effects” that have “the general effect of puncturing the reader’s complacency” (4). Thus, the ethics of narrative form plays a double game: “as work-ethics it strives for the artistic feats that can invite cultural remissions; as ethics of interpersonal communication, it plants stumbling blocks that, on the contrary, discontinue such timeouts” (5). When there is a “high view” of human potentiality and motivation, the carnivalesque, with its stress upon liberating disruption and release of individual energies, tends to predominate. While the carnivalesque is a mode of “oppositionality,” in the sense developed for narratology by Ross Chambers, that is, a “use of circumstances set up by [established] power for purposes the power may ignore or deny” (13, citing Chambers’s Room for Maneuver [1991]), there are also “intermediate” and “oppositional non-carnivalesque modes” (17). So Tristram Shandy is predominately carnivalesque, Tom Jones oppositional but with carnivalesque features, and Jane Austen’s work holds “examples of the non-carnivalesque oppositional” (18). Of course, there are diverse variations: The Tale of Two Cities is bitter carnivalesque and Ulysses is “radical self-carnivalization” (18).

While the schema has sufficient subtlety and flexibility to yield readings of some cogency and insight, as a global theory it seems limited in its frames of reference. It is odd that any work concerned with ethics, sociality, and affect published in 2010 would give the impression of being unaware not only of the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, but also of work in psychology and neuroscience that, building on Antonio Damasio’s groundbreaking Descartes’ Error (1994), elaborates entwinements of cognitive, affective, and ethical mental processing for which mirror neuron research has provided remarkably specific neural-physiological grounding. Certainly not every discussion of ethics and literature need be centred around Levinas, but his account of the ethical as what calls the spontaneity of individual freedom into question, thereby disrupting good conscience associated with personal and cultural self-complacency, and his treatment of tensions between the aesthetic and the ethical are very close to what Toker describes as “puncturing the reader’s self-complacency” through “stumbling blocks” that “discontinue ... time-outs.” The readers most likely to be interested in Toker’s subject are those most apt to wonder how Toker’s analysis might be refined by engagement with Levinas or how Levinas’s treatment of the same issues might inform Toker’s claims and readings.

Similarly, it can only seem dated to ask in 2010 how narrative form works upon cognitive and affective processing without considering what mirror neuron research means for emotion theory, developmental psychology, language acquisition, and accounts of empathy and sociality. To separate narratology from cognitive science neglects a history of intercourse between the two fields that dates at least from Mark Johnson’s...