Dual Narrative Progression and Dual Ethics:

The dialogical and admirable discussion on the ethics of literature by Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller in Thinking Literature across Continents is very engaging and thought-provoking. Ghosh and Miller have different conceptions of the ethics of literature. To the former, the ethics of sahitya resides in "a variety of hunger" as created by and inherent in sahitya itself, in the form of "the desire to feed on the 'other' and be fed upon" (Ghosh and Miller 2016, 207). In other words, the hunger of sahitya, connected with emotion, takes the form of outwards-oriented "desire, motivation, intention, and dynamicity."² By contrast, Miller uses "the ethics of literature" in the western traditional sense, focusing on "the issue of how to act or choose rightly" (2016, 233). For Miller, each work "has a different idea of the ethics of literature from the ones that preside over each of the other works" (2016, 233). He therefore takes an inductive approach, discussing the unique ethics of individual texts through careful and comprehensive close reading and only offering generalizations as based on the specific analyses. By contrast, Ghosh goes beyond individual works and concerns himself with the innate ethics of sahitya as a genre, often starting from generalizations and synthesizing various sources for his transcultural poetics. What is more, to Miller, the historical and biographical contexts of the author's writing and different contexts of reading bear on the ethics of a literary work, but for Ghosh sahitya has internal ethics, often functioning on its own, to the point of being independent of any originating and reading contexts.

Despite the differences, Ghosh's and Miller's approaches to the ethics of literature have the following features in common. First, they see a literary work or literature as a genre as having a certain kind of ethics, without considering the possibility of the existence of dual ethics. Secondly, they treat the ethics of literature as positive, respectable, and authoritative. Miller explicitly acknowledges "a work's ethical authority" over him and respects "the author's ethical responsibility to his readers" (2016, 232), while Ghosh discusses the inherent and independent ethics of sahitya with admiration, reverence, and perhaps even awe.

In some literary works, however, we have dual ethics, one of which might be highly problematic. This happens in the cases where the literary work has two narrative progressions: a plot development, which is the concern of both Ghosh and Miller and literary critics ever since Aristotle, and an undercurrent paralleling the plot development, another narrative movement that I have designated elsewhere "covert progression"³ and that has so far eluded critical attention in general.

A case in point is Kate Chopin's "Désirée's Baby" (Chopin 1976) whose plot development is very dramatic: Désirée is a foundling adopted by the Valmondés. After growing to womanhood, she is wooed and wed by Armand Aubigny, a neighboring planter and bearer of one of the finest names in Louisiana. She gives birth to a son who looks to be of mixed race. Armand spurns both mother and child for the black blood, and Désirée, carrying her baby, commits suicide. Eventually, Armand learns that the son's African features come from himself instead of Désirée. Most critics take this narrative primarily as one protesting against racism. However, Catherine Lundie asserts, "Readers and critics see the story as a tragedy of racism, of the slave system. But in fact it is something much more specific: a tragedy of the African American woman. The condition of being black and female is much more debilitating than that of being black and male" (Lundie 1994, 131). This view is shared by some other critics, who see Désirée as a victim of double racial and sexual discrimination.⁴ Viewing the narrative in terms of literary history, Robert D. Arner puts the story in "the Uncle Tom's Cabin tradition and the Clarissa tradition" (Arner 1996, 145).

Insofar as the plot development is concerned, Chopin's "Désirée's Baby" has a positive and respectable ethics, directing penetrating criticism...