Haunting Encounters: The Ethics of Reading across Boundaries of Difference by Joanne Lipson Freed (review)

This book by Joanne Lipson Freed is illustrative of a kind of criticism indebted to, and in one sense following from, the “ethical turn” in literary studies. To make this introductory point is not to reduce the originality of Freed’s study, but it is to suggest that in identifying and discussing a range of “haunting encounters” in narrative fiction, Freed is influenced and aided by important work done in the field of narrative ethics. The influence of James Phelan, whose rhetorical narrative theory provides a significant part of Freed’s theoretical framework, is particularly noticeable. In common with Phelan, Freed is “specifically concerned with the intersection between various formal aspects of narrative and moral values” (Phelan). Moreover, aligning her approach with that of “humanist ethics,” she acknowledges “otherness as important for ethical engagement with narrative” while emphasizing “the benefits of connecting across difference” (Phelan).

While Freed’s book is inspired by Phelan’s work, it is also influenced—in a positive sense of the word—by scholars such as Adam Zachary Newton. A notable critical gain of Newton’s contributions to narrative ethics is his demonstration, in a series of books from Narrative Ethics (1995) onwards, that narrative and ethics are inseparable. There are very few narratives entirely free of ethical issues, nor are there narratives whose moral values are not shaped through narrative form. These moral values may be different both in kind and scope, thus often creating tensions typically related to, and expressed through, the varying views, actions, and attitudes of the text’s characters and narrators. The ethical questions raised by a narrative text are often prompted by such tensions—questions asked by the author via the different agents of a narrative, and questions asked by the reader about the narrative. As Hanna Meretoja and Colin Davis put it, “the ethical dimension of a narrative takes place in dialogue with the reader or the viewer” (Meretoja and Davis 7).

A demonstration of Meretoja and Davis’s important point, Freed’s book is also conversant with the main ideas of narrative ethics expounded by Newman. Emphasizing the crucial role of the reader or viewer, she asks, “what role, if any, can literature play in bringing us into ethical relation with one another?” (3). This is a key question in her book. Focusing on a subset of contemporary ethnic fiction and Third World fiction that “addresses itself, at least in part, to privileged outsiders (frequently white and/or Western) across boundaries of cultural difference,” Freed argues that “these works complicate familiar models of narrative ethics, both those that credit fiction with a special ability to inspire empathy and fellow feeling, and conversely, those [...] that cite alterity, or difference, as the necessary foundation for ethical relationships” (4).

For Freed, variants of haunting are a recurrent theme in the works she chooses to discuss. She argues that in responding to the imperatives of cross-cultural reading, haunted fiction illustrates “the ways in which both sameness and difference are essential to our ethical encounters with literary texts” (30). Following the Introduction, each chapter discusses a pair of works that, partly because they are framed differently both culturally and aesthetically, illustrate how fiction becomes ethical through the interplay of, and tension between, sameness and difference. In Chapter One, “Figures of Estrangement,” Freed discusses Toni Morrison’s Beloved alongside Mahasweta Devi’s less well-known novella “Pterodactyl.” This comparative analysis proves critically productive, underscoring the significances of both literary texts’ interventions. Both aesthetic and political, these interventions are distinctly ethical: in different yet surprisingly similar ways, they speak for those at the margins of society: recently freed black slaves in Beloved, India’s disenfranchised indigenous minority in “Pterodactyl.”

Discussing Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things in Chapter Two, Freed uses trauma theory “to explore how histories of imperial domination refuse to be confined to...