The Ethics of Literary Communication: Genuineness, Directness, Indirectness ed. by Roger D. Sell, Adam Borch, and Inna Lindgren, and: Narrative Ethics ed. by Jakob Lothe and Jeremy Hawthorn (review)

Ever since the ethical turn of the 1980s, narrative theory has foregrounded the importance of values and moral choices. The books under review both employ a communicative framework, but they conceptualize and apply it quite differently. A previous work of Roger Sell of the Åbo Akademi in Turku, Finland, was reviewed in Partial Answers 11/1 (2013). The Ethics of Literary Communication, the most recent publication of the Åbo network, provides a clear view of its approach. Literature is “basically a kind of dialogue” (3), studied not from the perspective of Jakobsonian pragmatics or rhetorical narratology — to name just two popular communicational methods — but from an evaluative and ideological standpoint that might be called humanistic. The introduction describes the book’s aim as an attempt “to see how literary writers treat their addressees as human beings” (3). It assumes that “the same ethical criterion can be applied to the writer-respondent relationship as to human interaction of any other kind. What Åbo research is endorsing here is nothing less than the universal human right to respect and fair treatment” (3). While the editors of this volume may claim to be influenced by New Historicism and linguistics, both of which connect the literary text with the non-literary context, the most obvious influence is phenomenology and the philosophy of Levinas, more specifically his “account of how we recognize the human other” (4).

This process of recognition, or its failure, is central to the fourteen essays collected in this book. The terminology they have in common is Sell’s distinction between genuine communication, “in which people fully recognize each other’s human rights and personal autonomy” (23), and distorted communication, which is hierarchical and imposes power relations. Genuine dialogue is uncoercive; distorted dialogue is coercive. An example of the latter is E. E. Cummings’s Preface to his Collected Poems 1923–1958, which sets up a clear-cut distinction between the good and the bad audience, the “you” who must be like the “I,” and the disdained group of “mostpeople” (52). Another coercive form of communication is E. M. Forster’s memoir “West Hackhurst,” which contains an attack on a family (the Farrers) of higher social standing. Jason Finch disentangles the complex literary devices and masking techniques at work in this text about failed communication, which, he argues, really longs for uncoercive, genuine communication.

In addition, these two communicational types may be direct or indirect. Direct and genuine communication amounts to “comparing notes about something as viewed from within . . . different lifeworlds” (5). It entails “a frankness which respects the autonomy of the other person” (23). Direct and distorted communication implies a bullying attitude. But sometimes what seems to be friendly conversation may actually be threatening, or what seems to be frank and rude may be even-handed, as in the case of Pope’s attack of women writers in The Dunciad, studied with great ingenuity by Adam Borch. More generally, a typical strategy in this collection is to show that a particular writer, despite the initial impression of doing the opposite, either enhances or thematizes the openness implied in the notion of “comparing notes.” This is “indirect communication,” and it is viewed as literary sophistication. For instance, Sebastian Hüsch’s essay on Kierkegaard aims to show that Either/Or manages to communicate as literature rather than as the philosophical book for which it has most often been mistaken.

In his interpretation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 126 and Keats’s “To Autumn,” Jonathan Sell similarly submits that the authors’ “willed suspension of communication” (169) may result in the absence of “any cognitively accessible message,” but instead offers “an experience of a kind of sublime” (184). These poems therefore still constitute strong examples of genuine communication...