The essays by Elaine Scarry and Charles Larmore are very stimulating, suggesting, as they do, two ways to construe the idea of an ethics of reading. Let me say something about each of them in turn, and then I will sketch the beginnings of an account of my own.
Larmore began, I thought, with the right problem: We know we can be responsible to people, and we have some idea of what that entails. But to speak of a responsibility to a text seems like anthropomorphism. Philosophers are fine with anthropomorphism, but here, as with all figures, we would like to find a literal truth they point to. To find something to which we can be more literally responsible, he suggests that we have to start with the thought that “though the text … is not another person, it was written by a person to embody his or her thinking and feeling.” He goes on to propose that our responsibility as readers just is our responsibility to the author.
I am not sure I agree. And I would like to sketch, in an admittedly rather abstract and perfunctory way, the basis of my disagreements, as I think there are important issues at stake.
Larmore says, “if it is possible to misunderstand a text, then there must be something that the text actually says, and since texts do not write themselves, what they say can only be what their authors meant in the very process of writing them as they did.”
I think there are two problems here. First, it seems to me that literary reading only begins with what the text says, and so it is not best explained as seeking to know what it says. Second, the thing that starts the process of literary reading—which is indeed, I grant, what the text says—is a property of the words it uses that runs free of the author’s ambitions for them. The task of figuring out what someone wrote is not the task of figuring out her intentions but the task of figuring out the intentions with which the inscription she wrote is associated by linguistic conventions. These two will coincide in only the most barebones cases of literal nonfiction.
In any case, while literary reading begins with what the text says and what the text says has little to do with the actual intentions of its author, what is literarily interesting about the text is almost never what it says but many of the other things it does, only some of which it does with what it says. To understand these other effects, we need both to understand conventions beyond the linguistic—narrative conventions, prosodic rules, and the like—and to find things to say about those effects. Inspired by reading a single limerick of Edward Lear’s, one might write a poem that almost shared its form. It might go like this:
There was a young bard from Japan
Whose limericks never would scan.
When asked why this was,
He said, “It’s because
I always try to get as many words into the last line as I possibly can.”
In explaining what is going on here, we need to refer to the metrical conventions of the limerick; they do their work because this poem breaches them, whether or not it was the author’s intention to do so. Now, of course, in this case it would be an extremely strange hypothesis that the actual poet did not know about these conventions, as the poem’s joke depends on them. But my point is that we need no independent access to the poet’s intentions here, so it does not matter what they actually were.
Indeed, as far as I know, this limerick, like many other famous limericks, is anonymous. We know almost nothing about the author. It would seem strange to be concerned with the aims of a person about whom we know (and care) so little in beginning to approach this verse. This also counts against this approach.
Larmore suggests that our responsibility to the text is a responsibility to the author and that sloppy reading misrepresents, and thus wounds, the author. Perhaps that is so, though these are wounds that do not cause much actual suffering. But a sloppy reading that is not attentive to the conventions, linguistic and literary, that constrain a reading betrays not just the author but all those whose conventions they are. Whether this is a betrayal that rises to the level of a moral harm—whether, that is, it is something we should not do because of what we owe to others—I am less certain.
But it is a kind of wrong: it is a betrayal of a notion of reading. And that notion is our notion, the conception of us as a community of critics and scholars and readers. In perpetrating it, it seems to me, you betray us. The literary life of our cultures is a collectively created good, produced by the participants’ conformity to (and, as the limerick reminds us, occasional defection from) its conventions. The defections need to have a detectable purpose—a purpose visible in them, so to speak—if they are to be contributions. (One way of making a defection detectable would be to announce it, of course.) Without the contributions of conventional responses and motivated defections, we would not have a literary culture.
I am almost totally in sympathy with Scarry’s essay. I agree in finding it plausible that the forms of reading literature that criticism aims to enable sometimes diminish injury. I am inclined to think, too, that the incitement to empathy and to disciplined deliberation are central to that moral achievement. And I agree with her when she connects these two things. What they have in common is not just the recognition but also the chance to practice (and thereby deepen and strengthen) the recognition, that there are multiple points of view, two sides to every coin.
I should say that the fact that I agree with these claims is the result of reading her essay, and is not something I had grasped before; so I am grateful to her for her essay and its arguments. She claims a role for beauty in literature’s ethical achievement as well; only this thought was not new to me, as I had learned it from her earlier.
If I were to offer my own positive account of an ethics of reading, it would start like this: Reading has norms, which develop alongside but independently of the texts we read. They are not mostly ethical norms; that is, they are not simply applications of the broader ethical norms that fix how we ought to treat one another and what it is for a human life to go well. But, as Scarry shows, there are ways in which profound ethical issues in this sense are addressed and ethical projects are advanced by literature and its readings.
As readers, our conformity to literary conventions, like the conformity to norms of prosody or plot for writers, is what is needed for reading to work as a practice. We can do other things with texts than read them, in this sense; but to offer a reading of a text to others is to commit to the developing practice. The points of the practice are not external to it, and, as I say, they develop. But like all artistic practices, reading flourishes only when people—as creators and as audience—are committed to continuing an ongoing conversation. That is the commitment that I think gives reading an ethics in the first place: It generates obligations to others, as does our participation in any human project from which we benefit. That is why misreading can amount, as I said, to betrayal.
Is there an ethics of reading? There seem to be several. For Wayne Booth, who brought the topic of the ethics of reading to the fore, it is a question of the ethics guiding the reader’s decisions about what to read: “Which of the world’s narratives,” he asked “should now be banned or embraced in the lifetime project of building the character of an ethical reader?”1 What models should a reader embrace, and specifically how does a reader negotiate between a tradition of exclusion/purification (in which you behave ethically by rejecting the impure), and one of embracing everything human, if only to test every supposed virtue? The question for Booth was what choices to make for the best ethical training.
This is related to one aspect of Elaine Scarry’s wide-ranging paper, specifically to her claim about the ethical effects of reading literature for encouraging empathy and justice, but it is not the same question. It would be nice if Scarry’s argument about the ethical effects of reading were true; perhaps it is true, but I am reminded of Françoise in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, who, when the pregnant kitchen maid was suffering the most appalling pains, was sent to fetch a book about them and much later was found weeping copiously at the description of the symptoms, crying, “O holy virgin, is it possible that God wishes any wretched human creature to suffer so?” But when she came back into the kitchen maid’s presence, Proust writes, “at the sight of those very sufferings, the printed account of which had moved her to tears, she had nothing to offer but ill-tempered mutterings, mingled with bitter sarcasm.”2
I want to focus instead on what I take to be the more recent question about the ethics of reading—put forward by J. Hillis Miller and Derek Attridge, as addressed by Charles Larmore: To what extent does our own reading involve an ethical relation to the text? Larmore claims that if there is an ethical relation to the text, this must be based on a relation to the author as person, but I am not convinced.
One possible reading activity involves commitment to revealing the truth of the text. In Getting It Right: Language, Literature, and Ethics, a book that has not been as widely read as it should be, Geoffrey Harpham (who could not be present at this symposium because of an ethical choice—his daughter is getting married) writes not about the ethics of reading but about what he calls “The Ethics of Analysis.” This is a high-powered account of a process of strong reading in a variety of fields and contexts. Here, the ethics of reading is not at all a quest for the diminution of pain. Rather, it is a matter of paradoxical necessity for effective analysis of the truth of the text. “The task of the analyst,” Harpham writes, with some ironic distance, “is to overcome the resistance of a coded, indirect, metaphorical, fragmentary or occluded utterance, and to produce a version that is represented as being in certain respects truer than the original, while remaining true to the original.” That is, the analyst claims to reveal what is really going on in this text. But, Harpham continues,
If the first requirement of the secondary text is that it represent the primary text, then the analyst must undergo an act of repression in which his self-sufficiency, his autonomy are humbled and subjected to the imperative of the text, a submission to what the primary text actually says, and therefore compels him to say.3
This is a complex process in which, as one exposes what the previous text truly says, one performs an act of violence, drives it into a position of dependence on one’s own text that will reveal the truth of the original; but at the same time, in this structure one is subjecting oneself to the structures and demands of the text being read, setting aside one’s own desires and prejudices in order to read the text truly. This process involves not respect for the author (since one claims to show that the author did not truly grasp the truth of his or her own text), but a peculiar ethics of reading that follows from the commitment to reveal the truth of a text. But this is only one of many modes of reading.
There are situations in which it seems right to expect a reader to behave ethically toward an author—the best case scenario for Larmore’s model. For instance, when writing a review of a book, a professional expectation is that you will read the whole book, attempt to understand the project from the author’s point of view, and describe the argument or vision before criticizing it, and when criticizing it not distort or misrepresent. Ethical considerations arise here, it seems to me, not because of anything about the nature of reading but because (1) you are writing about the book for a public and (2) you are doing so in a context where you are expected to inform. If you choose to write polemically about a book that has been published for some time and has already been reviewed, especially in a case where there is controversy, there is no need to try to grasp the author’s perspective or treat the author ethically. Your ethical obligation, rather, is to your own readers: that you not deceive them as you make your arguments about the errors of the author’s ways. It seems to me a fortiori the case that one has no ethical obligation to the author of a text when the author is dead. Attempting to do justice to Marx or Freud, to treat them properly, not as a means to an end but as an end in itself, is perfectly acceptable, but this is only one possible project; it is equally valid simply to use the texts of Marx or Freud as resources for argument or foils to define your own views more distinctly. Again I would say that the ethical obligation is to your own readers, not to a dead author.
When you are not writing or speaking publicly about a book but only reading it, I cannot see that the question of an ethics of reading arises. This is not because I deny that texts are the expression of their authors’ intentions. To claim that one has an ethical obligation to the work because it is the expression of the views of a person seems to me to cheapen the notion of an ethical relation to persons by diluting it. To say that I owe the same obligations to all the books in the library as I do to my neighbor is to deny that there is anything at all special about my obligation to treat another person ethically. It may be wrong to ignore someone who is speaking to you, and it may be somewhat unethical completely to ignore what someone is trying to tell you; but there is nothing wrong with skipping pages or whole chapters of a book to see if there is anything there that interests you. It may be wrong to attribute motives or presuppositions to a friend without giving him or her an opportunity to respond, but attributing motives or presuppositions to a text that we are reading is an important mode of analysis.
It is perhaps true that in the case of a novel the ideal relation of a reader to the text is one that simulates an ethical relation to persons, that tries fully to enter the imaginative world of the work, to give the author every benefit of the doubt and so on, but this is only one of many possible modes of reading. Most of the reading we do is very different; we look for things relevant to our concerns, for ideas or information that will stimulate us. We pace our reading not according to notions of what is required for justice to an author but according to our own interests. We read carefully when it seems important, and skim or skip altogether when it does not. There is nothing wrong with that. Authors put their texts into the world for unknown readers to use as they will—that is one of the gambles of authorship. Your text may encounter people who will despise your work and you, who dismiss it out of hand, as well as those who read carefully or self-effacingly. Authors cannot expect care and diligence from every reader.
So I do want to challenge the notion of an ethics of reading, which seems to me to have been designed by literary critics to make their activity look more ethical, at a time when much literary criticism was accused of being nihilistic or worse. I understand the notion of the singularity of the work of art, which makes it a little bit like a person, but one of the exciting differences is that we can do with the work what we will, without harm. We have to respect persons; we cannot creatively mold them into something else. But with works we can. We can quote selectively; we can parody or transform. Even if one does not accept Harold Bloom’s notion of the history of literature as a history of strong misreading, a history of belated authors trying to slay the strong precursor in oedipal battles, it is certainly the case that piety toward the predecessor text has seldom accomplished much. Jean-Francois Lyotard in Le différend goes so far as to depict the reader as “the persecutor of the work,” who holds it hostage, to make it show what it means.4
So I would deny that ethical treatment of the work is the ideal. Wayne Booth, who inaugurated this line of thinking before it was taken up by J. Hillis Miller and Derek Attridge, introduced a distinction that I think is important, between understanding and overstanding. Understanding involves what we might generally think of as ethical reading: trying to understand a work on its own terms, in the ways in which an author might have conceived and intended it. Understanding is asking the questions and finding the answers that the text insists on. “Once upon a time there were three little pigs …” demands that we ask, “So what happened?” not “Why three?” or “What is the concrete historical context?” (both examples of overstanding). Booth prefers understanding to overstanding, but he recognizes that it can be very productive to ask questions that the author does not intend us to ask. To illustrate overstanding he writes,
What do you have to say, you seemingly innocent child’s tale of three little pigs and a wicked wolf, about the culture that preserves and responds to you? About the unconscious dreams of the author or folk that created you? About the history of narrative suspense? About the relations of the lighter and the darker races? About big people and little people, hairy and bald, lean and fat? About triadic patterns in human history? About the Trinity? About laziness and industry, family structure, domestic architecture, dietary practice, standards of justice and revenge? About the history of manipulations of narrative point of view for the creation of sympathy? Is it good for a child to read you or hear you recited, night after night? Will stories like you—should stories like you—be allowed when we have produced our ideal socialist state? What are the sexual implications of that chimney—or of this strictly male world in which sex is never mentioned? What about all that huffing and puffing?5
Good questions all, though they might be said to manhandle the text. If ethical reading involves attempting to grasp the author’s realized intention, these are questions that do not lead that way. Asking what the text conceals or represses is not reading according to our model for ethical dealings with a person, but it is important for critical reflection.
I’d like to conclude by quoting G. K. Chesterton, who wrote, “Either literary criticism is no good at all (a thoroughly defensible proposition) or else criticism consists of saying about an author those very things that would have made him jump out of his boots.”6
In reading Charles Larmore’s essay, I very consciously made an effort to understand exactly what he meant to say. This I could only do, of course, by attending closely to the sense of the words and their syntactic organization, with due regard to the generic conventions of the academic paper. But I read always with the assumption that the text was the embodiment of a clear intention. I was on the alert for tonal subtleties, especially irony of any sort, which would have demanded some adjustment to the literal meaning of the sentences (though in fact irony seemed to be absent). My careful attention was partly due, it is true, to my knowledge that I would eventually have to account for my reading before a sophisticated and astute audience, but an important impetus to scrupulousness was also what I would regard as my responsibility as the reader of a philosophical text. That responsibility is ultimately to the author of the text, a responsibility awakened by the fact of the author’s mental labor in producing a verbal artifact; to read sloppily or with a closed mind would be to slight that labor and to do an injustice to the author. This, then, would be an example of the ethics of reading.
It is an example that accords wholly with Larmore’s argument, with which I have no quarrel in its application to a text such as his own. My difficulties begin when I try to apply the argument to a literary text (or, as I would prefer to say, a literary work, for reasons that I will come to in a little while). Early in his discussion, Larmore asserts, as an “absolutely crucial” point: “Though the text that we read is not another person, it was written by a person to embody his or her thinking” (emphasis mine). Though this description might be appropriate for literary scientists like Lucretius or Erasmus Darwin, it seems wholly inadequate for the creative process of most poets, novelists, or playwrights. But let us assume that what Larmore really meant when he wrote this sentence (and I realize that in distinguishing between what the words say and what the author “really meant” I am already casting a bit of a shadow over my initial agreement) was that it was written by a person to embody his or her thinking, feeling, imagining, intuiting, hoping, and all the many other experiences that may go into the creation of a literary work. With this rereading, it becomes possible to agree with Larmore that even in the case of literature “the practice of reading can have an ethical character at all and there can be such a thing as an ethics of reading only if … our relation as readers to texts is ultimately, if not directly, a relation to another person.”
Or, I should say, it becomes possible to agree if we make another modification: “another person” should surely be “another person or persons.” If I read a medieval mystery play, I am aware that the words have been shaped by many hands, probably across many generations; if I read Robert Lowell’s English version of Racine’s Phèdre, I am enjoying both the crafting of the French play by the latter and the power of the English verse composed by the former. (If I witness a performance of one of these plays, of course, I also have to take into account the creativity of the actors, the designer, the director, and perhaps others as well as the various authorial originators, a point to which I will return.) “Intention” is starting to look like a less and less useful word when it is literature we are dealing with—something that should not surprise us after all the ink that has been spilled over it in the debates of literary theory.
In any case, intention as Larmore describes it does not sound very much like intention in the ordinary sense of the word—and in my responsible reading of his text, it is my obligation to try to ascertain exactly how he is using it. What we might assume to be the intention “behind” the text, perhaps checkable against the author’s own statements about his or her intention, appears to be something quite different: Intention in his paper is referred to not as something behind the text, but as co-extensive with it. Thus “misreading” is defined as “failing to grasp what the text itself says” (we might note that for a moment the text has become an agent); we are told that “what the text says depends on the text itself”; and the notion of intention is importantly qualified by the assertion that the author’s intention must count “insofar as he realized this intention in the composition of the text.” This is puzzling, as it had seemed that Larmore was talking about texts in general (and perhaps not literary texts at all), yet the identification of the author’s intention with “the text itself” rather than what the author wanted to say is not something we associate with more quotidian texts. If a journalist writes a piece that appears to defame a public figure, the former can say with perfect good sense, “I did not intend to defame so-and-so”; he or she may be lying—the piece may indeed be defamatory—but it remains the case that in an instance of this kind intention cannot be identified with “what the text says.”
In the case of the literary work, however, this understanding of intention makes more sense. It means that an ethical reading of a literary work is one that attends with care and with an open mind to the meanings of the words, as captured by means of the publicly shared knowledge of the language, the appropriate generic conventions, the histories of usage, and so on. Because of the problems they raise, I would prefer to ditch the words “intention” and “text” and speak in terms of the author’s work, a word that nicely combines the labor of creation and the created artifact. One way of representing this shift in approach is that the focus is not on what literary uses of language have in common with all uses of language—which appears to be Larmore’s method—but what literary works have in common with all artworks. The viewer of a painting or the listener to a piece of music are also ethical agents whose responsibility is to the creator or creators of the work (and in the latter case, to the performer or performers as well). What these works “say”—the word is becoming a little problematic now—or what they mean is unlikely to be convertible into language, but then what a literary work means is equally resistant to linguistic conversion. Just because a literary work uses language as its medium is not a reason for thinking that its meaning is purely linguistic. If we think of the work of art as an event rather than a set of signs to be decoded, and the reader’s response as an experience rather than a meaning to be carried away, we are less likely to fall into this trap. And focusing on the reader’s experience makes it possible to shift from a notion of the “author”—always too easily identified with the flesh-and-blood individual—to what I have termed elsewhere “authoredness”: the assumption that the words we are reading emanate from a historical creative agent, whose exact character (individual, sequence of individuals, group; known or unknown) is irrelevant but whose real existence cannot be doubted.
In discussing literature, then, I am not able to accept Larmore’s assertion that what texts say “can only be what their authors meant in the very process of writing them as they did.” And I am not talking about the significance of literary works (if the distinction between meaning and significance is a sustainable one, about which I have my doubts); I am talking about meaning, though this has to include the meanings generated by, for instance, the handling of plot, metaphor, rhythm, and diction. Meaning is also inseparable from context: When I turn to other passages by the author to clarify what I am reading, I am not searching for an intention, as Larmore suggests, but rather I am following the normal practice of using context to determine sense. An author’s oeuvre, like a single work of art or the art of a particular period, constitutes just such a usable context.
Yet I want to emphasize as well my agreement with Larmore that if reading—at least the reading of literary works—is a matter of ethics, this is because the reader has a responsibility not just to the words being read (which I think is a dubious concept), but to the creator (or creators) of the work of art they constitute. If we can assume that what is at stake is the literary work, I am very much in sympathy with Larmore when he states, “To write a text, to express something of oneself in writing, is … to make oneself especially vulnerable to others,” and when he goes on to argue that our treatment of the vulnerable is a particularly revealing test of our ethical character. There are echoes here, no doubt unintentional (in the common or garden variety sense of the word), of one of the most demanding of ethical thinkers, Emmanuel Levinas. For Levinas, ethics inheres in responsibility for the other—and he names the other “par excellence,” using the Biblical phrasing, as “the widow, the orphan and the stranger.” Although Levinas would have had no truck with the willingness on both Larmore’s and my part to extend the notion of responsibility to include the reader’s response to the inaccessible and sometimes unknown creator of the literary work, his work—as much literary as it is philosophical, perhaps—captures with great power what might be thought of as the ethics of reading.
Unlike Larmore, Elaine Scarry addresses very specifically the matter of the reading of literature. However, it is only her third question that relates closely to the issues that I have been discussing. The first two questions are empirical in nature, and it may simply be the case that the evidence is unavailable and inaccessible. Claims about literature’s efficacy in producing large-scale improvements in ethical behavior are purely post hoc. Even if it could be shown that there is a connection, it is hard to see how particular attributes of literature could be singled out as responsible for it. Empathy, disputation, and beauty are neither peculiar nor essential to literature. Similar or perhaps stronger claims could be made for many other characteristics of literary reading that have important ethical implications, such as scrupulousness, open-mindedness, and imaginativeness.
Scarry’s third question is not empirical but is itself ethical: Should the reader or teacher work actively to cultivate and instill the ethical force of literature? Here she and I are in agreement: Readers and teachers of literature do have an ethical responsibility, though I would characterize it not so much as “making clear the lines of responsibility to real-world injuries” or providing reminders of “the changes solitary readers have made,” but rather as the obligation to do justice to the inventiveness and singularity of the literary work, and thus to the achievement of its author or authors. This capacity for responsible responsiveness demands of the reader an openness to change, a quality Scarry has rather wonderfully described by means of the metaphor of an internal silk fabric—a metaphor that, for me, is the most powerful moment of her essay.
Discussion Session 1: The Ethics of Reading
DUNCAN WRIGHT: Elaine Scarry, you gave a beautiful example of literature as an ethical project, as enlarging our sympathies. Do you also think we can say that reading helps us understand and recognize manipulation in society and in culture?
ELAINE SCARRY: First, I never think there is a one-to-one relationship between someone who reads literature and someone who acts ethically. The example given of Françoise in Proust’s work has counterpart examples in the works of Pushkin, Tolstoy, and James—say, of a character crying at the opera and then not attending to a coachman freezing on the theater steps. But I do think glacially, over a large population, that one’s ability to think counterfactually and pliantly does absolutely make one better at attending to misuses and manipulations of language.
RICHARD SENNETT: Do you draw a distinction between empathy and sympathy in your work? I think of sympathy as identification with someone else—Adam Smith’s theory of moral sentiment and putting yourself in the place of another. Empathy is attention to someone with whom you cannot identify, and the mode is more curiosity than identification. Empathy is a more powerful force ethically. It creates a public realm in a way that sympathy does not because we are honoring the stranger, attending to someone we may not like or understand or know. I wonder if that is a useful distinction for you?
ES: It probably is a useful distinction; I have heard others make it, and I am never sensitive enough to what is at stake in the distinction. One thing that is important in the reading I am talking about is a kind of self-erasure, a putting aside of the self. I would see the ideas that Derek Attridge raised about imaginative freedom and attention as very bound up in it.
MARJORIE CURRY WOODS: As someone working in medieval and classical literature, I was grateful that you brought many of those texts into your discussion. I also work on the tradition of boys empathizing, and to some extent sympathizing, with women characters like Dido. There seems to be no direct correlation between that identification and social action. Suzanne Keen has discussed this lack of direct social action resulting from empathy or sympathy.1 But I think if we tie this only to social action and what goes on outside the classroom, it might blind us to the fact that these exercises may help with creativity and the learning of literature. Finally, it does seem that if these kinds of sympathetic readings are happening very early historically in our literature, it has not changed our ethics very quickly.
ES: Right, it’s not that I read and then I go out and care more about people. It’s glacial and over time. I may be completely wrong about this causal connection but I do literally believe it is the case. We can see it not only in medieval texts but in ancient Greece, in the part the Panathenaeum plays—the recitation of poetry—in giving rise to the Lyceum, to the assembly, and to the jury. Plato quotes Homer 150 times—I think he knows the poem by heart.
On the issue of empathy, it is both celebrated and berated. Empathy tends to be celebrated more outside the discipline of literary studies, and I think both views have to be listened to. I listen very carefully to the voices outside because when you are inside a discipline you never step outside the frame in order to see the central questions. You are inside the frame of the discipline, whereas people outside keep having to step over the frame. When you talk to ordinary readers outside the discipline—and I mean serious, intelligent readers—they are often reading primarily for this act of sympathetic or empathetic identification. This practice doesn’t go away (even if it is rightly critiqued sometimes) because I think it is such a fundamental attribute of reading.
ERICA KISS: This is a question for Charles Larmore. Your model about the intention expressed in the work actually, to me, describes propaganda or a propagandistic text rather than literature, in that you assume a strong agency or purpose in the work. In artistic works, you do not quite have this expression of a purpose; purposiveness in the work tends to be implied. The semantic strategy in artistic utterance is not that the author expresses a purpose that the reader is obliged to understand. The semantic strategy is more like gambling, where you imply something, thereby risking not to be understood in a specific, predetermined manner. This allows an interpretive freedom in literature that is not available in propaganda.
CHARLES LARMORE: The way I think one ought to approach the question of interpreting literary texts is by first of all understanding what it means to interpret texts of an ordinary sort. To do that, I think it is helpful to understand how to interpret human actions. When we try to interpret someone else’s actions, we try to figure out what that person was intending to do. We don’t necessarily assume she is fully or even partially aware of what she was trying to do. Her own reports about what she was trying to do are no doubt evidence, but we don’t assume that she is an authoritative interpreter of her own action.
I understand what you mean, that in literary texts intention may not be directly expressed. A literary text does not begin with a topic sentence; it may proceed by implication. Literary texts are much more complex, elaborately structured artifacts. But I think in the first instance we are trying to find out why certain things are in the text and others not. It is a causal question, and the place to look for the cause is the author. It is not that the author is in sovereign control, and the sovereign herself may be shaped by all sorts of factors of which she is not aware, but all of this is part of what the text means. So I think we need to proceed first from an understanding of how we interpret human action. This is the historical basis for hermeneutics. Schleiermacher worked out his theory of textual interpretation by looking first at what it is to interpret a meaningful utterance in general.
BROOKE HOLMES: Back to the issue of authorial intent, I am not thinking about the ethics of reading as necessarily an obligation to an author, but more as a challenge to how we instrumentalize texts. That is, texts push back, become resistant, not because we have offended the intention of the author but because we are being forced as readers to become more pliable, to think differently or to occupy a different perspective. Our intention that we may have come with to instrumentalize a text in a certain way may be thwarted, may not be allowed in the close reading. Reading texts from another historical period in particular may have this ethical dimension.
Also, thinking about metrics, I wonder if we need to justify this ethics of reading in real-world effects. Or is there a way to articulate more robustly the value of this practice that is not dependent on external effects, a value competitive with those that might be produced by the social sciences? Or do we just end up having to say we believe in its good effects?
ES: Maybe some alternative set of values could be more explicit. We don’t talk about beauty much, and I think that omission would not be so harmful except for the fact that advertisers are every day telling us that when we see something of beauty we should buy it, whereas centuries of poets and philosophers say that when you see something beautiful you should begin to repair the injuries of the world. If students understood that when they perceive beauty they are being called upon to repair the injuries of the world and to educate themselves, that would be a good thing.
I do think we enter into a relationship with a text, something like what you described in your question. Texts remake us. If I say I am a Keatsian, it means that I read Keats and I have been partly remade by Keats. A made object is always a fulcrum that has magnified benefits beyond the caloric input of the craftsman, and that do not end with a particular reader. Some of these benefits include a greater pliancy of thinking, a greater openness to the concerns of others.
DANIEL GARBER: Derek Attridge raised the question of painting, music, and one could add architecture, all disciplines in which we can talk about reading as well. Reading artifacts in those other contexts may raise ethical questions that are a little different than those raised by the focus on literary texts.
DEREK ATTRIDGE: I think the differences among the modalities of art are easy to exaggerate. Because literature works with language and we use language to talk about it, we all too easily fall into a trap of assuming an exceptionality for the literary work. We do need to think about what it means to read a painting or a building, and so on, and whether it makes sense in those cases to think of what we are doing as trying to divine the intention of the painter or architect or maker. Rather, I think it is in the experience of a viewer or a listener where we should talk about the ethical value of art.
JONATHAN LEAR: We have been talking about the role of literature in making us better, but there are certainly corollary examples of literature making us worse. Literature does not always move us in the direction of the good. We have this idea of the role of literature as deepening the soul, creating inwardness, but readers may become worse off because their ends are bad, not just because they are misreading. Literature can play a role in people becoming extremely mistaken.
ES: I appreciate what you say, and I know there are empirical examples on both sides, but I think the overwhelming effect on people’s consciousness is to the good. I know I would need many more examples to convince you, but I do believe it. I suppose I am making an empirical argument, but I am also making a theoretical argument with historical examples.
One more thought—literature and art do this work best when not crowing about their virtues. A lot of the good effects of art work much better when taking a very modest, repudiable position, as the humanities have now in the universities. Universities in the medieval period, and Islamic universities (as George Makdisi has shown2), start with the study of poetry and then get to a point where the centrality of that study may get repudiated. I think that is part of the work that literature and art do—that is, they do their work in the world without quite getting their name attached to the effects they have brought about.
ARIANA REILLY: I wanted to make a distinction between reading as such and producing readings as critics. In producing or publishing readings and interpretations, it seems that the ethical responsibility lies not in our relationship to an author but actually to our audience. For example, I just heard a paper at a Victorianist conference about a Chartist magazine that, simultaneously while Dickens was being serialized, was reprinting Dickens and removing passages that did not agree with the Chartists, thus presenting Dickens as a Chartist. So that is another instance of promoting one’s political goals, perhaps unethically, by distorting or misreading a text.
DA: I agree absolutely that one has multiple responsibilities: to the implied author or creator of the text, but also to one’s own auditors and readers, and to one’s own historical, political, and social context. These responsibilities are never easily aligned. As Derrida argued in The Gift of Death, it is impossible to meet one’s responsibilities, and there is bound to be compromise and complication.
JONATHAN CULLER: From my point of view, most of the ethical questions arise not in the reader’s relationship to the author, but in one’s relationship to one’s readers. If you are sitting at home reading, you don’t have any responsibility to anyone. That is a moment of freedom. One has the resistances that a work offers to one’s initial assumptions, but I don’t think there is an ethical cast to that.