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

Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction demonstrates perhaps above all the continued critical interest in the relationship between ethics and literature. Toker makes this theme clear early in the introduction, stating her belief that “aesthetic experience has an intrinsic ethical effect, irrespective of the presence or absence of ‘message’” (3). In understanding the experience of literature this way—that is, as ethical in some sense because of its aesthetic qualities, rather than because of its “message,” Toker is recognizably in broad agreement (though she does not say so) with figures like Wayne Booth and Martha Nussbaum, who both see their criticism as drawing out the ethical effects of the special qualities of literature; as Nussbaum puts it, “The very qualities that make the novels so unlike dogmatic abstract treatises are, for us, the source of their philosophical interest” (29). However, the book’s specific theoretical model differs from their views by portraying “culture” as primarily a determinative and negative force: as Toker puts it, the “logical determinacy of a cultural development is of the order of disease” (20). And though “emergent cultural self-organization can be beautiful,” it is in the longer run problematic because of the “ease of automatic cultural conformity” (20). Nevertheless, art can interrupt these processes: Toker emphasizes the “loopholes that open up in cultural development” (20) and specifically the way narratives can “loosen the hold of habitual maxims,” thus preempting “their totalitarian control” (9). Toker cites as a precursor for this view Schopenhauer, who in her gloss regarded aesthetic experience as intrinsically ethical because it “silences the Immanent Will,” offering a “reprieve from” various determinative forces like “social interaction” (3). These interruptions are the “cultural remissions” to which the title refers; Toker borrows the term, without explanation, from anthropological discourse, where it refers to what one author terms “conventionalized relaxation of social controls” (Gusfield 78).

As the book moves into its chapters, Toker glosses a number of ways in which these remissions can occur: through carnivalesque narratives (in her discussion, works by Fielding, Sterne, Hawthorne, Dickens, Hardy and Joyce), partially carnivalesque works (George Eliot), and non-carnivalesque but nevertheless “oppositional” works (Jane Austen and Joseph Conrad). She fleshes out the “carnivalesque” with reference to “the phenomenon of play” (15), which in her view can share a “morphology” with the carnival (16). Toker follows Roger Caillois’s taxonomy of the various types of games, which differentiates between activities based on competition, chance, imitation, and “vertigo” (15); thus, the literary criticism of the book consists primarily in identifying the ways one can read various canonical novels as demonstrating these activities: for instance, Toker suggests that readers compete with Tristram Shandy on their first reading, due to its various complexities, for instance the “repeated calls for backtracking and catching up” (65); however, when reading Jane Austen, readers engage in imitative “mimicry” that “takes us, as readers, out of our own predicament” (92).

Perhaps the first question to ask of Toker’s approach concerns why she regards culture as so one-sidedly negative. The answer to this question takes some time to emerge, but when it does, it helps to make sense of an initially perplexing motif of Toker’s analyses. Running throughout the book are references to the Holocaust: an early footnote notes that cultural sophistication is compatible with doing a “day’s work at Auschwitz” (4), while the chapter on Dickens discusses the problems of undernourishment with reference to research on the Warsaw ghetto (100); this motif culminates in what Toker calls a “caesura” in the book, which opens with the dramatic phrase “It Happened” (175). And her conclusion explains further: “rather than representing an “outbreak of madness,” a “concatenation of cultural causalities” produced the genocides of the twentieth century, and may “still lead to new precipices in the century that started with September 11, 2001” (206). This suggests that for Toker, the central question in ethics concerns not commonplace individual agency, but rather the ways...