Ethical Criticism of Genre Fiction (Part 2)

Jun 03 2010 Published by under Pop Culture Association 2010

This is a sketch of a project I am working on, and of a paper I gave at the Popular Culture Association conference in April. Part 1 is here. Part 3 to come.

I. In Part 1 I argued that ethical criticism is not about rating books for how well they provide moral education. That view, known as instrumentalism, reduces the role of art to handmaiden of morality.  As a reaction to instrumentalism, aestheticism claims that there is no connection between art and morality. Oscar Wilde’s comment that “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” is the classic example of aestheticsm. It turns out that aestheticism has its own reductionist problems, which become clear once one considers how to keep morality out of an evaluation of any novel that attempts to deal seriously with moral matters.

So ethical criticism tries to steer clear of the faults of both instrumentalism (aka moralism) and aestheticism (aka autonomism). Different ethical critics have cashed out the relationship in different ways. Here are a couple of contenders:

a. Noel Carroll: “clarificationism” : The idea here is that don’t gain new moral knowledge, especially not in the form of propositional knowledge, but rather that art works have to engage their audience, and to do this they have to “fit” them. The audience has to mobilize its knowledge, including moral knowledge, and its emotions, in order to experience the work. This is especially true with respect to mass art, which has to be accessible.

Narrative art deepens our moral understanding by encouraging us to apply our moral understanding to specific cases. It forces us to move from knowledge to understanding (ability to application). When we read fiction, we connect different parts of our “moral knowledge stock”. Fiction thus exercises and enlarges our moral understanding.

Just understanding the narrative often requires exercising our moral powers. So reading a novel just is a continuous process of moral judgment. This is not a “consequence” or “result” of reading. It is reading. It is not going outside the work. It is of the work.

b. Martha Nussbaum: “virtue ethics”:  Martha Nussbaum has argued that engagement with fiction can cultivate certain highly cognitive moral abilities related to attention, attunement, and discernment, including the ability to notice morally relevant details, empathy, and the ability to better understand complicated moral issues. In discussing James’ The Golden Bowl, she writes:

[T]his novel calls upon and also develops our ability to confront mystery with the cognitive engagement of both thought and feeling. To work through these sentences and these chapters is to become involved in an activity of exploration and unraveling that uses abilities, especially abilities of emotion and imagination, rarely tapped by philosophical texts. (Nussbaum 1990, 143)

Nussbaum has certain goals in mind that have more to do with moral philosophy than art criticism. Her arguments about the moral importance of literature have a lot to do with her development of a neo-Aristotelian ethic. She thinks that morality is less about universal principles and more about human flourishing and the capacities needed to do so. In making that kind of claim, she situates herself as part of a later twentieth century philosophical take on morality that emerged as a critique (some would say antidote) to the abstract formalism that had dominated moral philosophy for a long time.  My own views on moral philosophy have been shaped mostly by this tradition.

Nussbaum actually says that fiction itself can be moral philosophy, and can be better moral philosophy than what you find in philosophy journals. This is because fiction captures the elements of moral life that an Aristotelian sees as most important, like character, emotion, and visions of the good, while traditional ethics essays remain at a level of abstraction – even their example of ethical dilemmas tend to be schematic and far fetched — that bears no resemblance to how moral deliberation actually works.

Nussbaum has interesting things to say about the inseparability of form and content. James isn’t just Aristotle dressed up with pretty images that you can remove like ornaments on a Christmas tree and have the essence left over. You can’t summarize or paraphrase any passage in fiction and hope to keep the same meaning, the way you can with a philosophical argument.

There are a number of other takes on ethical criticism, of course. I just give these as examples of kinds of ethical criticism that are more intelligent and compelling than those that seek to glean nuggets of moral lessons from books and throw out every thing else.

Note that for ethical critics, active reading is assumed. Carroll in particular emphasizes the way readers must fill in gaps in the narrative with their own stock of knowledge. Narrative also calls for us to feel certain emotions. If we don’t, we simply cannot understand the text.

II. What exactly do ethical critics evaluate?

This seems obvious: the book. But what is that?

Here’s my view (not unique to me. It’s from arguments found in Alexander Nehamas for example, and others, like Seymour Chatman)

I don’t know how to read a novel other than as someone trying to tell me a story. It is natural to posit a rational agent when we read a book. We assume the text is organized in a certain way for certain reasons. We realize we can find all of these words elsewhere but they are here, together, in a specific purposeful arrangement. More, the text is for us, the readers. We are engaging with someone who is deliberately engaging with us, aesthetically, morally, politically, cognitively. I think that positing an author is just part of what reading is. It is not some extra psychological effort readers may or may not undertake. The idea of a purpose leads naturally to the idea of an agent. But who is that? It isn’t the narrator or the protagonist, because the first can be unreliable, and the second is limited in understanding (her point of view may not be the only one we get).

The writer is the individual person who writes the book. But that’s not who I am thinking about when I review a book or do ethical criticism. You can tell because I make claims about the text and not about the flesh and blood writer. (Wayne Booth has a set of terms for this, as do others. Booth calls it the “implied author”. For Nehamas is it just the “author”. ). There are probably lots of things that go into the writing from the writer’s standpoint that, in caring deeply about the text, I do not care about — like that she needed to finish this book to make a mortgage payment or that the name of the protagonist came from the name of her best friend in first grade.

So the “author” (or “implied author” or “posited author”) is a fiction, with one main function: to allow us to read the text as purposive.

It follows that in ethical criticism, moral judgments are made about the literary work, i.e. about the author, not about the writer. In my experience on this blog, this can be a challenging distinction for some authors to grasp. And in some ways I don’t blame them: it is a very tight circle indeed. (The reader constructs the author, but the author constructed the narrator, so does the reader construct the narrator, and thus the text, too? Something has gone awry.) Are we just adding agents when we would do well to stick with 2 —  the narrator and the writer? Luckily, I don’t have to solve this problem to get to my main point. I just wanted to let you know I know it exists.

For my purposes, all we need is some conceptual space between the flesh and blood writer and the posited or implied author, enough so that when we make moral judgments about the text, we are not seen as making, mutatis mutandis, moral judgments about the flesh and blood writer.

Why am I spending time on this? I think it is because I am coming at this as a reader of genre fiction, and genre fiction is different from literary fiction in the closeness of its readers, who may aptly be called “fans”, to the authors. The question of the relationship between writers and readers is there in literary criticism, but it has special resonance for genre readers because of the relative closeness of genre writers to their readers in comparison to literary writers.

III. The relation of the moderate moralists’ theories to genre fiction.

I teach a course in philosophy and fiction, particularly ethics and fiction. I have read a lot of ethical criticism. And most of it –almost all of  it, really — is criticism of “literature”, and not just literature but the “classics”.  (And not just the classics, but a mini-canon of works, as I explain below). Here I am mainly referring to philosophers who write about ethical criticism. (Also, I am using the terms “literature” and “genre fiction” in their loose and popular senses. I am not, in doing so, necessarily buying in to invidious distinctions between them, least of all to an invidious distinction between their relative literary merits.)

So we are finally at the central motivating question of the paper: What is the relationship of our best known philosophical champions of ethical criticism to genre fiction? And is that relationship contingent or necessary (that is, do they just pick the classics because that’s what they happen to read or like, or do they not pick genre fictionspecifically because they believe that ethical criticism of genre fiction doesn’t merit ethical criticism in some sense?)

a. Nussbaum, like most philosophers who engage with literature, focuses exclusively on the classics, especially Henry James. She does not engage with genre fiction at all.
b. Booth – As an aside, I will say that I have problems with his theory overall, as it comes very close to moralism — not moderate moralism — about literature. But the moralism is most noticeable when he is talking (which he rarely does) about genre fiction. For example, Booth worries about “what [Stephen] King’s 300 million sold copies have taught the world’s unsophisticated readers”, and when challenged on whether he has actually read even one of King’s books, he says in a footnote: “I’ve tried to.”

This is a very common tendency: to use literary classics are exemplars of salutary moral effects and genre fiction as exemplars of potentially corrosive moral effects. It’s quite amazing, really. I mean, would you take your lessons on father/daughter relations from The Golden Bowl, as Nussbaum suggests? Squicks me right the heck out.

But Booth — unlike most others in this group — at least tackles head on the question of what kind of books work best for ethical criticism. And here’s what he says:

i. Using Sheldon Sacks’s typology of authorial invitation – satire, apologue (idea novels) and action novels, in which category Booth includes “novels like those of Jane Austen or Cormac McCarthy or, moving down the line in quality, Agatha Christie or Louis L’Amour”. He notes that that writers of action novels get “furious” when ethical critics focus on their work, because “for them, it is the beautifully formed action, conveyed in beautiful or witty or original style” that counts. “Consign the ethicists to hell, where they belong” so the authors of action novels are purported to say. My own view is that such authors are probably sick unto death of critics using genre fiction as an ethical punching bag.

But it is not just the authors’ faults: Booth claims without argument that action stories do not openly demand ethical criticism. This is very interesting to me, since actions — and the people who take them — are the natural subjects of moral judgment.

For Booth, the most important literary kind for ethical criticism “has no label” –”it engages us in serious thought about ethical matters, based on the reinforcement of certain ethical positions as admirable and others as questionable or indefensible, but also hooks us into plots of conflict that are inseparable from that thinking” (note that he implies action stories do not do this). His example of such writing? Henry James. (From “Why Ethical Criticism Can Never Be Simple”, Style, 1998).
ii. In his earlier (1988) book, The Company We Keep,  Booth offered a list of passages written by…

God

Ford Maddox Ford

DH Lawrence,

Barbara Cartland

Penthouse

I am guessing the order of this list tells us in no uncertain terms what he thinks of the ethics of romance novels. Booth allows that all of these texts claim to offer the reader something (his model is of the implied author as a friend, a friend who is always offering the reader something via the text). He writes:

The simple and obvious question, for example, ‘Do you, my would be friend, wish ME well, or will you be the only one to profit if I join you?’ can make the implied creators of the Cartland romance and the Penthouse garbage writhe with embarrassment.

When he says, in a footnote, that “almost any of the literary classics could for most readers be said to provide the kind of friendship we are celebrating”, he is at his clearest.

c. Carroll, who has done important work on horror, comedy, film, and on mass art  in general (The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart, New York, Routledge, 1990, A Philosophy of Mass Art, New York, Oxford University Press, 1998), is, not surprisingly, an important counterexample. He is explicit that Harlequin romances (despite being a “more mundane example”, contrasted with a “special case” like Citizen Kane) “can engage our imaginative and reflective powers.”

Yet, even someone like Carroll, who defends the potential of ethical criticism of mass art, tends, in his examples of morally significant narratives, to rely on literary fiction. And his examples of morally obfuscating fiction tend to be from genre works  – for example, when he singles out Silence of the Lambs and Pulp Fiction, both of which “encourage us to forge an emotive link” between gayness and horror. I am not claiming he is wrong about those films — he makes a persuasive case, actually –  just noticing where the chips tend to fall when philosophers are mining for examples of ethically bad art.

IV. Textbooks

You can tell a lot about the commitments of a field of study by looking at textbooks.

There are a few popular ethics textbooks that use literature as a source of  examples. (I would never use them. I don’t like making literature the handmaiden of philosophy.) These focus heavily on the classics. So, for example, in The Moral of the Story: An Anthology of Ethics Through Literature, the chapter on “Love and Marriage” has selections from:

Jane Austen (PP)

Leo Tolstoy (AK),

Shakespeare (R&J)

George Bernard Shaw

Daniel Defoe (Moll Flanders)

Guy de Maupassant (“The Model”)

John Cleland (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure).

When it comes to ethical dilemmas in love and sex, wouldn’t you think contemporary romance is the obvious place to start? But there is very little genre fiction among dozens of selection in the entire textbook.

ii. Ethics, Literature, and Theory. This is the book I used in Ethics and Fiction, and it is very good, but it makes use of all the usual suspects. At this point there is a mini-canon in ethical criticism of Huckleberry Finn, Beloved, To Kill a Mockingbird, anything by Henry James, Frankenstein, anything by Joyce or Flaubert, etc. We can’t explain this by pointing out that philosophers chose them because they can ssume audience familiarity, because can’t they also assume audience familiarity with Harry Potter, or The Godfather, or Gone with the Wind, or Miss Marple? Not insignifiantly, in this collection, genre fiction gets the most attention in a section on writers’ responsibilities.

iii. There is one popular intro to ethics textbook, The Moral of the Story: An introduction to ethics through literature, which is a bit misleadingly titled, as the majority of its narratives are actually popular film narratives. But when it uses fiction, it tends to be literary fiction.

Summing up this section, ethical critics tend to focus almost exclusively on literary fiction.  I think we should turn at least some of our ethical attention to genre fiction, especially romance. In the next part I will say more about why we should, about why that idea may not be enthusaistically embraced by all genre writers, and also about the difference genre makes in ethical criticism.

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Ethical Criticism of Genre Fiction Part 1 (my PCA Paper)

Apr 28 2010 Published by under Pop Culture Association 2010

Part 1 of a multipart post.

For newbies: this is part one of a summary of a paper I gave at the Popular Culture Association annual meeting in April 2010, with some additional commentary.

I. In what ways can an artwork be ethically evaluated? There are several ways:

    i. in its mode of production (for example, the business of publishing, or ethics of writing)
    ii. the ethical views or attitudes it endorses or rejects
    iii. in the quality of its exploration of ethical issues
    iv. in its consequences (for example, causing readers to accept morally salutary or problematic attitudes)

I am interested in iii and ii

I spent a lot of time in this presentation defending the general idea of ethical criticism, because I was talking to a roomful of romance scholars and readers. Romance readers are used to iv above. The majority of public discourse about the romance novel does not treat it as literature or even as subliterature but as a commercial pop cultural product. More specifically, it has focused on the romance novel as a potentially harmful, singular product (and even my locution there — “the romance novel” — evidences that). As a romance reader, I am aware that this is a sensitive issue, for good reason, so I wanted to take time to explain exactly what I propose to do when I propose to engage in the ethical criticism of romance novels.

For me, as a moral philosopher, ethical criticism of the romance novel is the tiny part I can contribute to taking romance novels seriously as novels. It is also the tiny part I can contribute to broadening the very narrow focus among ethical critics on certain set of literary works.

II. Assuming we also evaluate literature aesthetically, what is the relationship between ethical and aesthetic evaluation?

I am only interested in this question to the extent of ruling out any answer that forecloses the possibility of ethical criticism per se.

a. Autonomism –Ex. Richard Posner, Oscar Wilde: art and morality are entirely separate, irrelevant to one another. No art is subject to moral assessment. Moral value or disvalue has no impact on value of art work. Art is valuable because it is “absorbing” or “singular” or more generally “beautiful”,  or some other aesthetic quality. 

b. Platonism – all art is morally suspect (this has to do with Plato’s onotlogy. Just its distance from the really real, i.e. the Forms, makes art ontologically suspect.)

c. Utopianism – Ex. Herbert Marcuse — all art is morally uplifting (for example, because it shows the world as it might be, supports praxis); Ex. Sartre, who write that there could be no good novel endorsing slavery (like Plato, Sartre has complicated ontological reasons of this view)

III. Problems with these:

As Noel Carroll has pointed out, all of these theories hold a “common denominator thesis”, namely that all art has same relationship to morality (whatever that relationship is). It seems more likely that different instances and kinds of art have different relationships to ethics. For example, while Marcuse may be right that some art has a utopian moment, few would agree that Triumph of the Will, despite its excellent aesthetic qualities, shares that. To say, as Posner and Wilde do, that there is no relationship also seems false, when so much art has been produced explicitly for religious, political and ethical reasons. Art is of the world and the world is political, religious, ethical.

Posner is right that art doesn’t have to have a moral dimension to succeed as art. Nor is art an instrument of morality. Moral edification is just not the function of most good art.

Also, looking at art ethically doesn’t foreclose or distort appreciating its aesthetic qualities, unless we let it. For one thing, aesthetic and ethical qualities are often hard to separate, in part because one of the things that can make a work of art absorbing, asethetically, is the way it engages the moral life of the audience. Can you really say you understand Beloved or Huckleberry Finnif you don’t have a handle on ii and iii above? No one, or at least no one I take seriously, is endorsing reading a book only for its moral message (extracting nuggets of moral wisdom), construed in very blunt nonaesthetic terms. Doing so would not be to read it as art, but as some kind of pedagogical tool, distorting its aesthetic qualities in the process.

When many people hear “ethical criticism of fiction”, they think immediately of looking at fiction’s effects on readers. Although there are certainly folks who do that (on both sides of the fence, i.e., some who say books are great for you morally and some who say they are bad for you morally, as we saw in Plato and Marcuse, respectively), that activity does not describe what many people are doing when they engage in ethical criticism of art. Or at least not what I am doing, and here’s why:

For one thing, what tools would you need to investigate the “effects of art”?  Many of us can recall a book that seemed to affect us profoundly, changing our world view. I think it is fair to generalize this personal observation from our armchairs, as a sort of common sense grounding  for ethical criticism or indeed any art criticism, but it is a long way from that to having any data on the effects of books on readers in general, let alone the effect of a specific book on a specific reader.

How would you gather that data, if you wanted to? Not from sitting in your office thinking about it. One way would be using the tools of social sciences like psychology and sociology, including surveys and ethnography. More newfangled ways would include using noninvasive brain imaging technologies (I can talk more about such studies if anyone wants), to see what parts of readers’ brains do what when they read. I don’t see any “ethical critics” gathering the kind of data they would need to support claims about the effects of books on readers. That is not a suggestion that they do so,  but evidence for my contention that iv above is not what ethical critics are doing (or at least not what we should be doing).

Let’s suppose for a minute that our friends in neuropsychology or sociology gathered this data. And let’s suppose it showed that Something Bad Happens when certain people read certain books. Then what? Do we immediately have a case for censorship? No. The fact that “something is bad for some people”  rarely, if ever, prompts regulation. I need only point to the example of tobacco products. At any rate, we need a new set of tools to consider this very different question, tools that literary critics and philosophers do not, generally, possess. We need our legal scholars, our political scientists, our public policy experts. So, even if someone filled the huge empirical hole where the data should be about the effects of literature on readers, we would find ourselves in another hole, that it would take lot of work to fill in.

My point is that (a) most ethical critics, at least today, are doing ii and iii, not iv above, and (b) even if we wanted to do iv above we would have a long long way to go, and a damnable time getting there.

A couple more points on this topic.  I realize that, in one sense, talk about the effects of books has always been part of literary discourse, staring with talking about the effects on the reader herself. But it is one thing to talk about how a book made you feel while reading it, and another to talk about permanent or even long term effects. It is still another thing to talk about permanent or long term effects on other readers, i.e. readers who are not you.

IV. Romance

Romance readers talk a lot about the good effects of romance reading on their beliefs, attitudes and desires. They might say reading romance has helped them to be better communicators, to understand men, to demand their due from their partners, to get in touch with their sexuality, etc. That’s cool. But if we are going to do that, we also need to consider whether romances have had any negative effects. In other words, if you are going to play the “effects on readers game” you cannot rule out a priori (for example, by saying things like “Women are not just passive readers, i.e. dopes. We know the difference between fantasy and reality. Don’t infantalize  and patronize us.”) any and all claims about negative effects on readers of romance novels. 

Consider: how could it be that you only learned good or positive things from romance novels?

There are two options, as far as I can see. (1) Romance novels, the entire genre, only endorse good positive healthy attitudes towards gender, romance, love, sex, and everything else they take as their subjects (however those good attitudes are defined). That seems manifestly unbelievable to me, given my own experience as a romance reader, and given how large and diverse the genre is. That comes close to saying there is only one romance novel – one very morally good romance novel — and it has been written over and over.

Or (2) you know quite well that there is a lot of stuff you wouldn’t endorse in a romance novel, some of it apparently endorsed by the (implied — more on that later) author, but either (a) you don’t read those books, or (b) if you do, you don’t “learn anything” from them, because you filter the bad stuff out. Ok, but then, you aren’t “learning” anything fromromance novels. Rather, you are applying a moral framework you already possess to your selection of texts, or to your reading of texts, only letting what you have already decided are “good” messages in. In that case, it would be more accurate to say that your reading of romance novels reinforces or deepens or lends specification to moral beliefs you already hold. I think that is much closer to what is really happening, personally. But if it is, then we have to accept that if a reader holds pernicious moral beliefs, she can find some warrant, some deepening, reinforcing or specifying, of those bad moral beliefs in romance novels, too.

Ok, so this post has been all about saying what I am NOT doing when I do ethical criticism. The next post will say more about what I AM doing.

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