Theorizing the Novel in the Twenty-First Century
In the introduction to a 2002 special issue of diacritics on ethics and interdisciplinarity, Mark Sanders asks us to consider, “What points of contact, if any, are there between the current investment in ethics in literary theory, and the elaboration of ethics in contemporary philosophy?” Yet the question behind this question—the one that motivates his selection of essays for the issue—is why literary critics and theorists have drawn their ideas about ethics from Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Alain Badiou with little or no felt need to consult past or present moral philosophers. As Sanders goes on to note, while “in North America and the Anglophone world generally, the tendency in ethics has been to bring moral reflection to bear on questions in political theory” there “has been relatively little attention among literary theorists to developments in disciplinary philosophy.”1
Sanders’s observation of this disconnect is particularly intriguing when we consider that the return to moral reflection in contemporary literary theory is in fact a double return: the pursuit of ethics has been accompanied by a new celebration of literature, and it is in the imbrication of these endeavors—the new pursuit of ethics leading to a new defense of literature—that literary theory and moral philosophy find common ground in the twenty-first century.2 No moral philosopher has been more enthusiastic or more vocal about the positive social value of literature than Martha Nussbaum. But the mere mention of the author of Love’s Knowledge and Poetic Justice may seem to take the mystery out of Sanders’s question. Isn’t Martha Nussbaum—self-described humanist, avowed liberal, public excoriator of Judith Butler’s “defeatist” feminism3—the prima facie evidence of moral philosophy’s failure to get what is “new” about the new ethics? While literary theorists pride themselves in pursuing ethics and estimating literary value in light of and in response to complex and difficult poststructuralist truths, Nussbaum in particular and moral philosophy in general seem to remain, as Andrew Gibson has said, “pre-Barthesian.”4 While Gibson identifies the “pre-Barthesian” as a throwback to mid-twentieth-century naive humanism (epitomized for him by Lionel Trilling, with whom he groups Nussbaum), others have found Nussbaum so retro as to be antiquity itself: “Nussbaum is defiantly Aristotelian and therefore pre-Enlightenment; her slogan might be ‘Antiquity—An Incomplete Project.’”5
Those hostile to Nussbaum find it fitting that the pre-Barthesian who unembarrassedly confesses her love of literature, who argues not just for the positive social value of literature but for the superiority of literature to other types of social discourse, and who even goes so far as to claim that “literary people” (authors and readers of literature) are “best equipped” to perform ethical inquiry, would be in love with Henry James.6 It is one thing for Trilling in 1948 to hold up the Jamesian novel as an ethical ideal, to see literature generally and novels in particular as a moral corrective to what he calls the “cold potatoes” of social reform through government policies.7 After all, Trilling’s defense of the social value of literature is rooted in a prestructuralist sense of the liberal individual, usefully defined from the post-Foucauldian perspective of D. A. Miller as “the subject whose private life, mental or domestic, is felt to provide constant inarguable evidence of his constitutive ‘freedom.’”8 This is the kind of freedom that Trilling invokes when he argues that the imperialism of U.S. public policy can be checked only by the cultivation of the “free play of the moral imagination” and that “for our time the most effective agent of the moral imagination” has been a product of the literary imagination: “the novel of the last two hundred years.”9 For Trilling, the moral enterprise that is fiction—defined by its inutility, its anti-instrumentality, its inequivalence to state law—culminates in the work of an aesthete, Henry James.
But by 1990 shouldn’t Martha Nussbaum have learned from literary critics the political lessons of Jamesian aestheticism? In The Political Unconscious Fredric Jameson declares James’s creation of an aesthetics of the novel to have such profound social consequences as to be “a genuinely historical act,” a crucial cultural formation in the development of late capitalism. For Jameson, James’s refinement and glorification of point of view—both as a narrative technique and as a philosophy of perspectival individualism—serve as a “strategic loc[us] for the fully constituted or centered bourgeois subject or monadic ego,” enabling capitalism to “produce and institutionalize the new subjectivity of the bourgeois individual.”10 In the twenty-five years since Jameson made this claim, literary critics have fleshed out the list of Henry James’s political offenses. Many of these critics follow Jameson in their belief that James’s formal practices—and the aesthetic value that James attributed to novelistic form—are the key to his bad politics. James’s dedication to developing the novel into a high art form is understood as part of a more general effort on the part of nineteenth-century white male writers to make up in cultural capital what they were losing in sales figures. The ideological production of the aesthetic as a “discrete entity,” Michael Gilmore and others have proposed, was the “creation of white male fiction writers reacting against the commercial triumphs of the feminine novel.”11
In the post-Marxist and post-Foucauldian understanding of the development of the novel, James is indeed a culmination of the last two hundred years, and that culmination does produce, as Trilling believed, the liberal imagination. But for these critics the belief in the liberal imagination is precisely the problem that needs political reform. It has been the work of literary studies to show that the “free play” of the moral imagination is anything but free: it is an agent of regulation, discipline, instrumentality, and ideological delusion. Through its affective power and strategic representation of society, the novel creates a reader who (to quote D. A. Miller again) “seems to recognize himself most fully only when he forgets or disavows his functional implication in a system of carceral restraints or disciplinary injunctions” (x). In a similar line of argumentation, Nancy Armstrong finds the novel’s social power to lie in its genre strategies of “disavowal,” which transmogrify the “material body” as a social and political reality into a “metaphysical object” of “language and emotion”—an aesthetic act of partitioning that leads individual subjects to think of themselves as universal subjects.12
Is Nussbaum’s defense of literature in general and Henry James in particular anything more than the disavowal of her own social positionality? The literary values she admires, notes John Horton, “openness, subtlety of discrimination, a delicately nuanced understanding and a precisely graded emotional responsiveness [are] … perhaps not surprisingly, the virtues of a liberal literary intellectual.”13 And indeed Nussbaum’s conception of literature generally and the novel in particular is predicated on the ethical value they confer upon private emotion: literature, she says, gives “ethical relevance” to “particularity and to the epistemological value of feeling” (LK 175). The novel distinguishes itself as a genre by its “profound” commitment “to the emotions” (LK 40). This means, for Nussbaum, that the novel both communicates its meaning through emotion and communicates the ethical value of certain types of emotion. One such ethical emotion is the feeling of possibility: novels, she tells us, engage “readers in relevant activities of searching and feeling, especially feeling concerning their own possibilities as well as those of the characters” (LK 46). Our feeling of possibility is, for Nussbaum, an outgrowth of a more foundational ethical feeling: love. To feel that we love is at once involuntary proof of our deepest values—what we authentically care about, what we can’t not care about—and a means of developing better social practices since our love for others allows us to make their cares, their values our own, extending our experience by widening our “range of concerns” (LK 47). Nussbaum proposes that the art of the novel is first and foremost a performance of—and education in—the care we should have (and, for those of us who “love” literature, that we do have) for alterity, particularity, complexity, emotion, variety, and indeterminacy.
For the cultural critic, “love’s knowledge,” the care that on Nussbaum’s view is inspired by and enacted through novel reading, stands as strong testimony to the particular way the novel performs its ideological work, the way that novelistic aesthetics accomplishes the project of universalizing the individual subject. The novel as a producer and agent of care certainly fits into D. A. Miller’s account of the way the novel administers the “regime of the norm” (viii). For the Foucauldian, readerly love becomes the basis for (in Miller’s words) “the subject’s own contribution to the intensive and continuous ‘pastoral’ care that liberal society proposes to take of each and every one of its charges” (viii). Nussbaum’s notion that the problem of human flourishing is first and foremost a private and “practical” affair, a problem pursued through and solved in relation to our emotional experience of “life” and, most intensely, through our emotional experience of life as represented in novels (LK 21), is for the political critic confirmation of the liberal subject’s valorization of psychological interiority through its mystification.
A key moment in Love’s Knowledge provides a powerful example of how novels might be said to lead Nussbaum herself into liberal disavowal. She quotes at length a passage from David Copperfield which describes the “comfort” David derives from the characters he meets through novel reading. The passage that Nussbaum cites ends with David’s memory of “sitting on my bed, reading as if for life” (LK 230). For a chapter title, and elsewhere in Love’s Knowledge, Nussbaum restyles Dickens’s phrase “reading as if for life” as “reading for life.” Her substitution seems to perform the erasure of the materiality of social reality by the “free play” of the liberal imagination. To forget the “as if” is to equate reading with life, is to disavow the ideological nature of reading, the particular social conditions that encourage Nussbaum herself to believe that there could be no significant difference between life and its fictional representation, between reading as a private and individual experience and reading as cultural work. To forget this difference is to project both life and the reader as mystified essences, metaphysical objects.
It thus may seem the logical conclusion of Nussbaum’s liberalism that the political program she develops in Love’s Knowledge locates the path to social reform in the consciousness of a fictional character, and a Jamesian consciousness at that. The first thing that contemporary literary critics should teach the world in order to improve it, Nussbaum declares, is how “to confront reigning models of political and economic rationality with the consciousness of Strether” (LK 192). The man of the imagination is for Nussbaum the epitome of right ethical value, brought into being by James’s own ethical act: the creation of a novel that models through its narrative structure the “finely aware and richly responsible” acts of perception (the phrase is James’s) that are for Nussbaum the key to human flourishing (LK 148). What do politicians and law keepers have to learn from James’s representation of Strether’s consciousness? That “the well-lived life is a work of literary art” (LK 148). That this sentiment echoes the villainous aesthete Gilbert Osmond, who advises Isabel Archer in The Portrait of Lady that “one ought to make one’s life a work of art,”14 seems to suggest the limits and dangers of living “for” life by living life “as if” it were no different from art. To want to confront power with Strether seems a confession of one’s addiction to imaginary solutions to real political problems. In a postmodern world of pop culture, globalism, and multiculturalism, we might instead take it as a sign of our own cultural distance from the “genuinely historical act” of high capitalist subject formation that most readers today, academic and non-academic, feel the spectacular irrelevance of the Edwardian aesthete, either Strether or his maker. We might take it as the end of disavowal that we can say with Cynthia Ozick, “The truth of our little age is this: nowadays no one gives a damn about what Henry James knew.”15
But I want to argue that, even if no one thinks they give a damn about what Henry James knew, the modern novel that James helped to invent and the tradition of novel theory that he inaugurated provide a foundational aesthetics for the novel that underlies both Nussbaum’s ethical philosophy and the new ethical theory that has emerged, especially in the past decade, in the attempt to articulate a positive social value of literature for our postmodern age. To mention J. Hillis Miller, Gayatri Spivak, Judith Butler, Derek Attridge, Geoffrey Galt Harpham, and Michael André Bernstein is to invoke some of the most influential contributors to the new ethical defense of literary value. And while these theorists do indeed, as Sanders observes, derive their ethics from diverse political theorists (Foucault, Agamben, Adorno, Benjamin, Levinas, and Derrida), what Sanders and others have yet to note is that the heterogeneity of these political influences has coalesced in a surprisingly unified account of literary value.16 For these new ethicists, and a wave of others, the ethical value of literature lies in the felt encounter with alterity that it brings to its reader. It is the untheorized understanding of the form of the novel as inherently politicized that establishes a bridge between the poststructuralist ethicists and the “pre-Barthesian” Nussbaum. The development in the twentieth century of a novelistic aesthetics of alterity cannot be adequately explained (away) by the ideological notion of disavowal since the avowal of disavowal is part of what defines it as an aesthetics. I want to show how the achievement of alterity is, for both ethical camps, not only taken for granted as the novel’s distinctive generic purpose, but understood to be accomplished through novelistic form. I then want to suggest how the aesthetics of alterity derives from James’s own acute awareness that the politicized struggle between art and its ideological instrumentality is constitutive of novelistic aesthetics itself.
We can begin to chart the connection between Martha Nussbaum and the new ethicists by comparing her revision of Dickens’s “reading as if for life” with the ethical value Judith Butler finds in the phrase “for life, as it were.” The phrase that interests Butler is, importantly, Henry James’s—and it ends the last sentence of Washington Square, the novel that Butler has used to make her own case for James’s ethical insights. Here’s the full last line of James’s novel: “Catherine, meanwhile, in the parlour, picking up her morsel of fancy-work, had seated herself with it again—for life, as it were.”17 Since I’ve discussed elsewhere Butler’s new ethics in general and her investment in this line in particular, I want to draw forward here just the point of comparison with Nussbaum.18 Butler understands the conditional phrase (“for life, as it were”) as James’s insight into the necessary condition of meaning making not just in literature but in life. Because Butler sees all meaning making as an act of figuration, of the “as if” imposition of order and coherence onto experience, not just reading but any act of knowing is, on Butler’s view, created through the act of restyling “reading as if for life” as “reading for life.” For Butler, human understanding comes into being through the oscillation between reading for life and reading as if for life. Reading for life, we ignore or forget the conditionality of our understanding. Reading as if for life, we are self-consciously aware that our certainty is all hypothetical: we understand that we create the meaning we think we find; we know that when we feel most certain we are taking for fact exactly what we pretend to be.
How are these moments of self-conscious apprehension achieved? As Butler describes it, we come to self-consciousness about our pretended certainty through the confrontation with alterity, an experience of the other that surprises us in its intractability, its refusal to conform to what we imagine we know—to fit into our own personal “regime of the norm” the expectations that we call knowledge. For Butler, Washington Square provides us with this confrontation with alterity by refusing to explain the motives that drive its heroine, Catherine Sloper, to reject her suitor and pick up her fancy work. In refusing to explain herself to the other characters, Catherine, according to Butler, defines her autonomy not through language but by “marking the limits of all speaking that seeks to bind her, that offers itself to her as a way of binding herself” (208). The reader’s easy access to Catherine throughout Washington Square thus abruptly ends with her transmogrification from knowable point of view to unfathomable other. What Butler doesn’t say, but what is an important feature of her account of alterity, is that it is precisely Catherine’s move beyond social binding that binds the reader to her. Catherine’s refusal to explain herself—and James’s refusal to explain to us for her—is experienced by the reader as the emotional upset that reveals to the reader his or her own participation in the everyday binding we perform on the people we pretend to know. When James stymies our comprehension—in this case by substituting the ambiguating phrase “as it were” for the clarifying authorial judgment we expect and desire—Butler tells us “the reader is … left, in a sense, exasperated, cursing, staring” (208). On Butler’s view, this emotional response is the precondition for ethical knowledge and choice: we are put in a position to “understand the limits of judgment and to cease judging, paradoxically, in the name of ethics, to cease judging in a way that assumes we already know in advance what there is to be known” (208).
To cease judging is, in other words, to cease trying to understand Catherine and instead, to use Nussbaum’s word, to “care” for her as other. To the degree that the reader’s judgment can be converted into recognition of/for Catherine is the degree to which we read not just “for life” but, in an even more spiritual way, “for a life” (214, my emphasis). Being bound (to the enigma that is Catherine, to the ambiguity that ends James’s novel), the reader “has” (as James himself might say) her ethical experience: “we undergo what is previously unknown … we learn something about the limits of our ways of knowing; and in this way we experience as well the anxiety and the promise of what is different, what is possible, what is waiting for us if we do not foreclose it in advance” (209, my emphasis). Our experience of how literature binds us (binds us to characters, binds us to its emotional effects) is thus the happy psychological condition that frees us from our usual epistemological limits. The felt condition of our own binding makes possible, in other words, our knowledge of life “as it were.” Incomprehension of the other yields knowledge of the self: we are made to recognize our operative interpretative categories as our own “regime of the norm.” And this felt recognition of the limits of our ways of knowing opens up, for Butler, the possibility that we might change for the better, that we might actively try to judge less and undergo more.
But of course the psychological model that underpins Butler’s theory means this ethical lesson cannot be learned once and for all. Our capacity for undergoing is dependent upon our continuing to judge: alterity can only be registered positively by our experience of its power to disrupt us, to leave us, in a sense, exasperated, cursing, staring. Our avowal of our epistemological limits is something that must be freshly performed, undergone again and again. Indeed, the hope of Butler’s model lies in her belief that the ethical autonomy and significance of a life, of any one life, always exceed what D. A. Miller calls the social “system of carceral restraints or disciplinary injunctions” (x) by which we know it. For Butler, alterity is defined by the endless potential to resist comprehension, to trouble certainty. And it is precisely the endless possibility for psychological upset that creates the positive conditions for personal and social change. The end of the liberal subject’s feeling of “constitutive ‘freedom’” defined by private life (Miller) begins with the individual’s emotional experience of the private life as confounded, invaded. Vulnerability allows change. Anxiety, promise.
How does Butler’s “as it were” help us to understand Nussbaum’s erasure of Dickens’s “as if”? For Nussbaum the conversion of “reading as if for life” to “reading for life” is, as it is for Butler, grounded in two types of alterity: the reader’s honoring of the characterological lives depicted in the novel and the work of literature as itself a “life.” For Nussbaum, as for Butler, it is the encounter with alterity—with what Nussbaum calls the human—that produces “pains and sudden joys”—emotions that are themselves ethical in this context (LK 53). The narrative strategies of the novel—“complex,” “allusive,” and “attentive to particulars” (LK 3)—position the reader to care “about what happens” (LK 3–4), to be “lucidly bewildered, surprised by the intelligence of love” (LK 53) into an openness to the new and different. Nussbaum says she learns from Strether the “willingness to surrender invulnerability, to take up a posture of agency that is porous and susceptible of influence” (LK 180). “The life of perception feels perplexed, difficult, unsafe …. But this life also seems to Strether—and to us—to be richer, fuller of enjoyment, fuller too of whatever is worth calling knowledge of the world” (LK 181). Literary “texts” thus display to Nussbaum what Butler’s essay title terms “values of difficulty.” For Nussbaum, novels engage the reader in “the complexity, the indeterminacy, the sheer difficulty of moral choice … the refusal of life involved in fixing everything in advance according to some system of inviolable rules” (LK 141–2). For Nussbaum, as for Butler, we negotiate between the “conceptions” (LK 29), the “rules and principles” (LK 44), the categories for judgment that we bring to the text, and our willingness to be “in some sense passive and malleable, open to new and sometimes mysterious influences” (LK 238). This vulnerability, she believes, “is a part of the transaction [with literary texts] and part of its value” (LK 238). To be truly vulnerable, to have authentically risked, is to honor the power of the life of the other through the feeling of “surrender,” “succumbing.”19
Nussbaum’s account of the novel thus distinguishes itself from Trilling’s—and does so, moreover, in a way that complements the political critique of Trilling. For Nussbaum, the reader’s experience of the free play of her moral imagination ends in her experience of social restraint, of binding and of being bound to the life of the other.20 In Poetic Justice Nussbaum comes even closer to Butler in her meditation on the way literary representation produces otherness through figuration. Nussbaum’s term for figuration is “fancy”—and her definition of fancy neatly glosses why, in the James passage that so interests Butler, Catherine Sloper’s act of refusal is accompanied by the picking up of her fancywork. Nussbaum tells us: “fancy is the novel’s name for the ability to see one thing as another, to see one thing in another. We might therefore also call it the metaphorical imagination.” For Nussbaum, as for Butler, figuration enables us not only to apprehend alterity (to see one thing as another, to see one thing in another)—but to inhabit the conditions of possibility that ensure a future different from our “now”: that “other things [can be] seen in immediate things.”21
One reason the connection between Nussbaum and the new ethicists might be hard to see is that the name given by poststructuralists to their valorization of readerly experience is anything but love. But to find this much common ground between Butler and Nussbaum puts us in a position to understand how the names poststructuralist theorists give to literary experience—names like estrangement, defamiliarization, and difficulty—are, like Nussbaum’s “love,” an attempt to answer Foucauldian and Marxist subjective functionalism by offering an alternative theory of private interiority. Rather than being the “constant inarguable evidence of … constitutive ‘freedom,’” our interiority is, for Nussbaum and poststructuralist ethicists alike, the constant inarguable evidence of our constitutive sociality, a sociality felt as self-restraint. The disavowal of social positionality entailed by reading “for life” is countered by the avowal of social positionality necessitated by reading for life “as it were.” The psychological necessity of oscillating between disavowal and avowal is, for both Butler and Nussbaum and in new ethical theory generally, what makes possibility possible.
After noting the disconnect between literary theory and moral philosophy, Mark Sanders declares, “Literature is an other-maker. It is to this activity that literary theory must attend.”22 But it seems that novel writers and readers have been attending to this definition of literature for at least a century. Sanders can take for granted that literature is an other maker precisely because in our own cultural moment the novel and its aesthetics of alterity define the literary for most readers. The new ethics helps us recognize novelistic aesthetics as an inherently politicized aesthetics by showing how novel form positions the reader to experience herself as “free” through her experience of being socially bound. The reader experiences the free play of her imagination as produced through a power struggle with a social other. The struggle to bind turns back upon the reader, enabling her to experience herself as unfree, as in a constitutive relation with the other who, in turn, binds her. And because the reader experiences her own binding as both a private and emotional condition, as a relationship with the lives represented by a novel and the literary text as itself a life, for the new ethicists literature is theorized as conferring a felt encounter with alterity that is not simply compensatory for social positionality but outside of systematic discipline. In the new ethical defense of literary value as the values of novelized form, reading produces not false ideology but a true experience of how possibility is produced in and through the operation of social constraint.
In new ethical theory, literature provides not just (or for some not even) the fictional imagination of social reform projected through the realist idiom of a story world. Novel reading does not yield a portable list of rules or tips to guide conduct. For the new ethicist literature does not technically teach us anything at all—unless we understand learning as the overthrow of epistemology by experience, the troubling of certainty by an apprehension that comes through surprised feeling. Ethical knowledge is the experience of irresistible encounter with what one does not try to know, what one cannot but help know. It is knowledge that is beyond reason, of the emotions, and so intuitive as to seem a bodily knowing. To formulate this knowledge as epistemology, as we must do, is to register the moment that we move from being bound to binding and back again. But the felt conversion of knowing into knowledge is what enables the process to continue—and to be felt as a progress. The reader feels she comes to know more each time her current knowledge is confounded. Knowing is made possible by every felt failure to know and made new through every repetition.
That the reader’s ethical experience of alterity begins with the encounter with literary character is an aspect of poststructuralist ethics that provides the powerful link to James. James’s creation of deep psychological characters leads readers, and himself as rereader of his own work, to regard these characters as possessing an autonomy of their own, an autonomy that encourages the cultural perception that fictional creations have a right to human rights. The centrality of characterological alterity to the modern novel has shaped its aesthetic problematic in two fundamental ways. First, the modern novel’s commitment to the creation of autonomous characters positions any act of narration as a potential encroachment on the existential freedom of those characters. Second, the commitment to characterological autonomy positions literariness as itself inimical to novelistic mimesis. The new ethics helps us to see that the belief that characterological freedom should be honored and respected is made possible not just by the agency the story world accords characters but through the aesthetic functionalism the novel as an art form assigns them. Judith Butler can talk about Catherine as if she were an actual person not because James’s use of point of view bestows upon her a full subjectivity indistinguishable from our own, but because, as point of view and in other ways, Catherine as character is also an instrument of the novel’s form.
This is the ethicopolitical basis of novelistic aesthetics. The representation of character in the novel is never free from the threat of instrumentality, either from the subjective source of narration or by the threat of objectification posed by literary design. Fictional characters are produced as “human” precisely by the perceived limitation from both sources that novelistic form places on their autonomy. Fictional characters can be felt to be no different from real human beings to the degree that their functional positionality seems like a restriction of their subjective potentiality, a limit to the full freedom they have a right to enjoy beyond their representation by and within the novel. This double nature—character as a full psychology and character as an element of aesthetic form—has led in the twenty-first century to an understanding of novelistic narrative as inherently hegemonic. The all-too-visible incarceration of subjectivity by aesthetic form is decried as an abuse of representational power. The author who must more or less use his character for his own expressive ends is felt to be exploitative. The reader who identifies with a character worries about emotional colonization. And the reader and author who feel only the aesthetic thrill of a character’s fate carry the guilt of the voyeur. The doubleness of novelistic subjectivity (as person, as artistic instrument) is perhaps best emblematized by the novel’s third-person narrator, whose subjectivity is constantly imputed as the more than or the excess beyond the functional role as storyteller to which he is bound.
The politics of ethical possibility that the new ethicists find in literature generally are at the heart of Henry James’s anxious consideration in his prefaces and elsewhere of the lives bound up in his fictions. The new ethical defense of literary value thus importantly casts light on the development of novelistic aesthetics into the twenty-first century. The aesthetics of alterity allows us to understand, on the one hand, the untheorized privileging of novel form that undergirds the cultural critic’s interest in the novel and, on the other, the unacknowledged ethicopolitical values that inform the formalistic practice of teaching fiction as a craft. To show and not tell, to write what you know—such creative writing workshop dicta are connected to a conception of the novel as a social discourse different from other social discourses, made different by the aesthetic effects and ethical dilemmas particular to it. New ethical theory thus helps us see that what I have elsewhere called the social formalism23 at the heart of the Jamesian tradition of novel theory—the belief that the novel instantiates social identity through its form—is not a logical confusion about the ontological status of literary form, but an aesthetic effect of the novel as the genre has been developed through the twentieth century and into our own cultural moment.
Notes
1. Mark Sanders, “Ethics and Interdisciplinarity in Philosophy and Literary Theory,” diacritics 32 (2002): 3, 4. I am grateful to Charlie Altieri, Robert Caserio, Nancy Ruttenburg, Cindy Weinstein, and my graduate students at University of California, Berkeley for the exchange of ideas that enabled this project. I also want to thank the Berkeley Consortium for the Study of the Novel, the Huntington Library, the Stanford Center for the Study of the Novel, the University of Memphis, the University of Tennessee, and Princeton University for the opportunity to share work in progress. The version of “Aesthetics and the New Ethics” published here is based on the paper presented at the 2007 Huntington Conference, “American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions.” A subsequent version, edited by the author, appeared in PMLA 124 (2009): 896–905.
2. For recent work in moral philosophy on literary value, see Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Cora Diamond, “Henry James, Moral Philosophers, Moralism,” Henry James Review 18 (1997): 243–57; Robert Eaglestone, Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997); Jerrold Levinson, ed., Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Colin McGinn, Ethics, Evil, and Fiction (New York: Clarendon, 1997); Frank Palmer, Literature and Moral Understanding: A Philosophical Essay on Ethics, Aesthetics, Education, and Culture (New York: Clarendon, 1992); and Robert B. Pippin, Henry James and Modern Moral Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For new ethical literary theory, see Charles Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); Derek Attridge, Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); Michael André Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Lawrence Buell, “In Pursuit of Ethics,” PMLA 114 (1999): 7–19; Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack, Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001); Andrew Gibson, Postmodernity, Ethics, and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas (New York: Routledge, 1999); Dorota Glowacka and Stephen Boos, ed., Between Ethics and Aesthetics: Crossing the Boundaries (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002); Geoffrey Galt Harpham, “The Hunger of Martha Nussbaum,” Representations 77 (2002): 52–81; Stefan Helgesson, Writing in Crisis: Ethics and History in Gordimer, Ndebele, and Coetzee (Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2004); Lynne Huffer, “‘There is no Gomorrah’: Narrative Ethics in Feminist and Queer Theory,” differences 12 (2001): 1–32; J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987); J. Hillis Miller, Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005); Adam Zachary Newton, Narrative Ethics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); Dominic Rainsford and Tim Woods, ed., Critical Ethics: Text, Theory and Responsibility (London: Macmillan, 1999); and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching,” diacritics 32 (2002): 17–31.
3. Martha Nussbaum, “The Professor of Parody,” New Republic (February 22, 1999): 37.
4. Gibson, Postmodernity, 11.
5. Harpham, “The Hunger of Martha Nussbaum,” 57.
6. Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 192. Further references will be given parenthetically within the text following the abbreviation LK.
7. Lionel Trilling, “Manners, Morals, and the Novel,” Kenyon Review 10 (1948): 22.
8. D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), x. Further page references will be given parenthetically within the text.
9. Trilling, “Manners,” 27.
10. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 221, 154.
11. Michael T. Gilmore, “The Book Marketplace I,” in Emory Elliott, ed., The Columbia History of the American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 70–71. See Simon Critchley, Ethics—Politics—Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas, and Contemporary French Thought (New York: Verso, 1999); and Howard Marchitello, ed., What Happens to History: The Renewal of Ethics in Contemporary Thought (New York: Routledge, 2001) for studies of the political theory underlying the new ethics. See Sara Blair, Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); Karen Jacobs, The Eye’s Mind: Literary Modernism and Visual Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); and Carolyn Porter, Seeing and Being: The Plight of the Participant Observer in Emerson, James, Adams, and Faulkner (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1981) for particularly powerful political critiques of Jamesian aestheticism.
12. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 6, and How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719–1900 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 10, 18.
13. John Horton, “Life, Literature and Ethical Theory: Martha Nussbaum on the Role of the Literary Imagination in Ethical Thought,” in John Horton and Andrea T. Baumeister, eds., Literature and the Political Imagination (New York: Routledge, 1996), 88.
14. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (New York: Norton, 1995), 261.
15. Cynthia Ozick, What Henry James Knew: And Other Essays on Writers (London: Jonathan Cape, 1993), 2.
16. See Critchley, Ethics—Politics—Subjectivity; and Marchitello, What Happens to History for studies of the political theory underlying the new ethics.
17. Judith Butler (quoting James), “Values of Difficulty,” in Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb, eds., Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 208. Further page references will be given parenthetically within the text.
18. See Dorothy J. Hale, “Fiction as Restriction: Self-Binding in New Ethical Theories of the Novel,” Narrative 15 (2007): 187–206.
19. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 237, quoting Wayne Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
20. See Bruce Robbins on binding in Nussbaum and Butler in “Pretend What You Like: Literature Under Construction,” in Elizabeth Beaumont Bissell, ed., The Question of Literature: The Place of the Literary in Contemporary Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 190–206; especially 199–203.
21. Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon, 1995), 36. Further page references will be given parenthetically within the text following the abbreviation PJ.
22. Sanders, “Ethics and Interdisciplinarity,” 4.
23. Dorothy J. Hale, Social Formalism: The Novel in Theory from Henry James to the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).