Morals and Stories (review)

THE COMPAnATIST oftranslating positions taken into institutional practices—research programs, curricula , syllabi, pedagogies—remains. Much ofthe debate, theoretically compelling, even persuasive, simply bypasses the practical grounds for comparative work. By inscribing a report on the field in the context of a debate over the field, CLAM shrewdly but also symptomatically reveals the changed conditions now shaping the institution ofcomparative literature. Programs have proliferated to the point that political debate displaces top-down statements of policy. Vigorous debate, however, should not be too quickly interpreted as disciplinary vitality. Readers ofBruce Robbins's Secular Vocations (1993), or John Guillory's magisterial Cultural Capital (1993), will have little trouble relating the symbolic struggle enacted here to larger structural trends afflicting the humanities in general. Deprived ofthe founding rationale of"national defense," comparative literature can no longer proceed down the path ofprofessionalization and disciplinary autonomy, but must find new ways tojustify itself. While more established programs may be relatively insulated from such a legitimation crisis, elsewhere the need to explain the aims ofcomparative study pushes towards a discourse ofcivic virtue. And it is multiculturalism that provides, at present, the most salient language oflegitimation. What the content of "multiculturalism" will be— whether it is imagined as a retooled liberal pluralism or an agon of ethnicities, a critical cosmopolitanism or "global citizenship"—remains undecided, and ample opportunities exist for comparatists to press their (no doubt) various claims. Rick Livingston Ohio State University TOBIN SIEBERS. Morals andStories. New York: Columbia UP, 1992. ? + 235 pp. This small masterpiece ofcomparative analysis is a breath of fresh air. In an age when literary specialists are increasingly remote from the common reader, Siebers's discussion is down-to-earth, good-humored, and not infrequently humorous . This infusion ofcommon sense is largely responsible for the book's recurrent claim that traditional views deserve re-examination and partial salvage. A genuine free-thinker, Siebers is not afraid to borrow from the past. The opening chapters acknowledge the book's challenge to trendy politicized approaches to literature. Especially in his third chapter, "The Case Against Linguistic Ethics," Siebers turns on its ear the argument that stories can project only the moral prejudices of their times by noting that modern critics are themselves assuming an unconditional moral high ground in passing suchjudgments—a terrain which their theory says cannot exist. Throughout the book, one senses the fertile dynamism between moral and story—between the need to unravel morals into specific stories and the need to generalize stories into moral insights—which many recent theories have overlooked. Siebers views the dynamic as a complementary evolution toward truth rather than a duel to the death. Even ethical philosophers like Bernard Williams and Alastair Mclntyre, to whom Siebers does not begrudge a certain admiration, have tended to equate storyVcH . 20 (1996): 185 REVIEWS telling with society's instinct for self-preservation. The relation ofmoral to story (as chapter four demonstrates with a rather playful review ofAesop's Fables) is anything but propagandists. Instead, a salutary strain exists in the best literature between the wish to find lofty truths about life and the wish not to betray life by transcending too many of its details. The bulk ofthe volume is devoted to case studies ofthe role ofmorals in storytelling and ofstories in moralizing. In chapter five, Siebers ingeniously traces the use ofthe word ethos in the Iliadto demonstrate how its original meaning of"frequented place" already verges, even for Homer, upon its modern meaning of"a set of standards." His insistence that the word's few appearances are dictated by the poet's dramatic timing rather than by chains of oral/formulaic associations (65) is dubious. Yet the overall argument conforms well to what we know ofsuch highly traditional societies. When Achilles removes himself from the only "place" in which his actions have context—the invading army under Agamemnon—his behavior becomes morally irrelevant, and even destructive. Perhaps inevitably, two chapters on Plato follow. Homer has usually emerged from this juxtaposition as the less acute moral analyst, so it is refreshing to read Siebers's assessment of Socrates as a frustrated story-teller and failed moralist. Socrates banishes from his ideal republic not only Homer and epic, but the...