Reading Unruly: Interpretation and Its Ethical Demands

Introduction

1 Introduction An Ethics of the Unruly There is ethics—that is to say, an injunction which cannot be grounded in ontology—in so far as there is a crack in the ontological edifice of the universe: at its most elementary, ethics designates fidelity to this crack. Slavoj Žižek The late twentieth century witnessed unprecedented attention to ethics in literary studies. This burgeoning academic interest proved strong enough to earn the label “Ethical Turn,” a term that points to an undeniable shift in the concerns of interpretive communities but risks homogenizing the unruly voices responsible for such a change.1 A genealogy of the turn quickly reveals its contested origins, its fraught beginnings, and its uncertain duration. Is/was the “Ethical Turn” a mere moment in the cyclical history of interpretive turns, situated between the “Linguistic Turn” and the nascent “Aesthetic Turn,” with the “Political Turn” eagerly waiting in the hermeneutic queue?2 While debates over the function of literary criticism surely date back to the very inception of literature, Frank Kermode detects among contemporary critics an unparalleled hostility to both the ethical value of criticism (which, in the past, “was extremely important; it could be taught; it was an influence for civilization and even for personal amendment”3 ) and the aesthetic value of literature in its own right.4 It might be tempting to see the “turn to ethics” as a kind of exorcism of the post-68 mentality that gave us the slogan of “the death of the author” and the rise of symptomatic readings.5 The turn to ethics would be, 2 INtroduction in this respect, tantamount to a return to the so-called older dispensation. By contrast, Wayne C. Booth resists such a nostalgic and potentially reactionary move in his 1988 The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, and adopts a broader and less exclusionary definition of ethics, not only taking stock of a new ethical sensibility sweeping literary studies but also, and perhaps more importantly, reading it back into its most trenchant opponents: I’m thinking here not only of the various new overtly ethical and political challenges to “formalism”: by feminist critics asking embarrassing questions about a male-dominated literary canon and what it has done to the “consciousness” of both men and women; by black critics pursuing Paul Moses’skindofquestionaboutracisminAmericanclassics;byneo-Marxists exploring class biases in European literary traditions; by religious critics attacking modern literature for its “nihilism” or “atheism.” I am thinking more of the way in which even those critics who work hard to purge themselves of all but the most abstract formal interests turn out to have an ethical program in mind—a belief that a given way of reading, or a given kind of genuine literature, is what will do us most good.6 The following study takes seriously the invitation to adopt a more inclusive approach to ethics (one that brings contesting viewpoints together under the umbrella of ethical criticism) but remains wary of defining an ethics of reading as a commitment to the “most good,” a term at once disarming for its obviousness (who, among ethical critics, doubts that a literary ethical sensibility is beneficial?) and alarming for its vagueness (what is meant by beneficial or good?). Reading Unruly: Interpretation and Its Ethical Demands advocates an ethics of interpretation that foregrounds fidelity to literature’s unruliness, that is, its resistance to hermeneutic mastery, its ungovernable character. Such an ethics deviates from the paradigmatic model of Neo-Aristotelian tradition, according to which the reader’s ethical task requires the faithful reconstruction of the beliefs, values, and norms that the author desires to communicate .7 While this tradition emphasizes questions of exemplarity—the belief that literature teaches us through examples and counterexamples—Reading Unruly conceives of fidelity as related less to the interpretation of an artwork’s content or message than to the reader’s receptivity and responsiveness to it. Attesting faithfully to the unruly, and to the “singularity of literature,” to borrow Derek Attridge’s suggestive formulation, means vigilantly resisting literature’s conflation with moral philosophy. Disentangling a literary work’s 3 introduction ethical concern from its universalist aspiration is perhaps the most distinctive feature of this mode of ethical criticism. An ethics of reading articulated in these terms owes much to literary theorists such as Roland Barthes and Maurice Blanchot, who constantly underscored literature’s recalcitrance, as well as to Jacques Derrida and...