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- Herausgeber: ibidem
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Studies in World Literature
- Sprache: Englisch
Recognition and Ethics in World Literature is a critical comparative study of contemporary world literature, focused on the importance of the ethical turn (or return) in literary theory. It considers the shape and development of the ethical engagement of the novels of Amitav Ghosh, Chimamanda Adichie, Caryl Phillips, Kazuo Ishiguro, Zadie Smith, and JM Coetzee, exploring the overlaps and divergences between Levinasian/Derridean and Aristotelian ethics as they are brought to bear on literature. The characters' recognitions and emotional responses in these texts are integral to the unfolding of their ethical concerns, and the ethics thus explored is often marked by the complexity and impurity characteristic of the tragic. A view of recognition is advanced that shifts it from the more usual political understanding in the field towards seeing it as a formal device used to unfold an ethical knowledge peculiar to fictional narrative, and particularly suitable for the concerns of world literature authors in its interconnection of the universal and the particular-a binary that has been crucial in postcolonialism and remains important for the wider field of world literature. The analysis unfolds with a focus on three broad ethical themes-religion, the memory of violence, and the human-eliciting the novelists' contributions to these debates through the investigation of the functioning of moments of recognition in their novels.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
There are a number of people without whomthis work would not have materialised, and whomI would like thank.
This book is the culmination of my graduate research at the University of Oxford (DPhil) and the University of the Western Cape (MA). As such, I remain grateful for the critical input of my research supervisors into those original projects, namely Elleke Boehmer and Cheryl-Ann Michael. I would also like to thank the editors of the Studies in World Literature series, Janet Wilson and Chris Ringrose, for their patience with me in preparing this manuscript and for their valuable comments and insight.
There have been numerous colleagues, friends and family members who have supported me along the way and who have contributed through discussion, debate, and commenting on various drafts. In particular, I would like to thank the academic communities of the University of Oxford, the University of the Western Cape (UWC), and the Centre for Humanities Research, UWC. More specifically, I would like to nameSteve Whitla,Scott Teal, Nisha Manocha, Charlotta Salmi, Stephanie Yorke,Ankhi Mukherjee,Deborah Rosario,Neal McEwan, and Maurits van Bever Donker. I am ever grateful to my wife, Machilu, for her continual encouragement and unswerving support. Needless to say, any errors remain my own.
This project draws on the research that was enabled by funding from the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission and the Mandela Rhodes Foundation,without whose generosity it would not have been possible.
IntroductionEthics, the World, and the Postcolonial:The Case of Kazuo Ishiguro
Nobody would deny (though some of course do) that some works for some readers on some occasions do provide a precious melting of categories that would otherwise freeze the reader's soul. But are we to believe that every reader in every epoch most needs one kind of shock, or evenashock at all, and that there are no other ethical effects that for some readers in some circumstances might be more valuable?
(Booth1988, 68)
I
Thequestion of ethics in literature is not new. Wayne Booth, in hisworkThe Company We Keep: An Ethics ofFiction(1988), comments thatethical criticism isa"human practice"that"refuses to die, in spite of centuries of assault from theory"(6). Indeed, ethical concerns in and about literature (inits various forms) have run from Plato's banishment of poets from his ideal republic, through Sir Phillip Sidney's16th-centuryAn Apology for Poetry¸to today's postcolonial, feminist and queer critics, to name only a few.The current prominence of ethics in literary criticism is, then, a return to a concern that has, in the past, been absent from world literature. Focused asworld literaturetends to be on universalizable aesthetic appreciations, more localised ethicalcommitmentshave generally failed toregister. It is in postcolonial studies—many of whose textscouldalso be considered world literature—that contemporary concerns with the ethics of literature have been most robustly investigated. To approachthe ethics of world literatureissimultaneouslyto invokethe general (andancient) question of ethics in literature, and the postcolonial insistence on the influence of the legacy of colonialism on the ethical commitments of texts.
Anne Morgan's recent book,Reading the World: Confessions of a Literary Explorer(2015),is illustrative. In it,Morganrelates the reflections andchallengesthatframedher year of reading a book fromeverycountry in the world.Translating her experienceinto the imagery of travel and exploration, sheoutlines several difficulties, fromideas ofauthenticity that result from framing her enterprise in nationalistic terms (what she dubs, in her chapter titles,"Identifying Landmarks")tothe needforand limitations ofthe publishing industry(two featuresthatshe likens to following"trade winds"and departing from"the beaten track", respectively).In discussingthe more specificchallengesconfronted inbeginningherproject—namely the immense quantity of literature in the world and the opacity of other cultures and unfamiliar languages—Morgancriticisesthe advice of David Damrosch, a leading theorist of world literature,toembed individual readings of texts in cultural knowledge through preliminary research. She comments,
Damrosch overlookssomewhat[…] that, for many people, one of the major incentives for reading books from other cultures is discovery itself. Rightly or wrongly, we tend to regard literary works as windows on other worlds.[….]All this earnestness [of first researching the book's culture] takes the fun out of the idea of reading such works.(17–18)
Eschewing contextualizing research, on the grounds that itstampsout the desire with which one picked up the book in the first place, she, ironically,argues for Damrosch's understanding ofworld literature as"multiple windows on the world"or"worlds beyond our own place and time"—onepartof Damrosch'sdefinitionof world literature(Damrosch 2003, 15, 281). Morgan's book isinteresting, though,not onlybecausea popular text onthe challengesofreadingworks fromaroundtheworldis indicative oftheincreasing popularityof world literature, both academically and in mainstream culture, butalsobecauseher chosen metaphorof travel and exploration raisesthe spectre of colonialismand thusevokesthe tension between world and postcolonial literature within which this book is positioned.
There isfirst,somewhatobliquely, the ghost of empire past in thewell-documentedconnectionsbetweenexploration andtravel(writing)and the colonial project(Hulme 1990; Pratt 2008; Boehmer 2005). A more pertinentproblem,however,isthe way in whichthe exploration of foreign cultures and lands, particularly its proximity to discourses of tourism,feeds into present imperial structures, namelythrough thefigureofthe exotic.GrahamHuggan(2001)has explored in detailthe tensions inherent in the field ofpostcolonialstudiesbetween
contendingregimes of value: one regime—postcolonialism—that posits itself as anti-colonial, and that works towards the dissolution of imperial epistemologies and institutional structures; and another—postcoloniality—that is more closely tied to the global market, and that capitalises both on the widespread circulation of ideas about cultural otherness and on the worldwide trafficking of culturally'othered'artefacts and goods.(68)
Thecontemporary circulation of literature fromother cultures runs therisk of exoticization:"the domesticatingprocess through which commodities aretaken from the margins and reabsorbed into mainstream culture"(Huggan 2001,59).WhileHuggan's focushereisonpostcolonial literature, this challenge isfaced more sharply by world literature.A crucial part of Huggan's analysisfocuses ontheuseby postcolonial writersof"strategic exoticism"in order to critique (continuing) imperial structures anddiscourses(75).Thus, Chinua Achebe'sThings Fall Apart, despite containing anthropological elements—andfrequentlybeing read as ethnography—destabilises such readings through its use of irony and"postcolonial parody-reversal"in its closing movements(92). This is a form of critique that, as Robert Young(2014)remarks,is concerned with the impact of the text, through itsvarious modes ofresistance, on"realities beyond itself"(217), but it isthiscriticalaspectof postcolonialism (inbothwriting andcriticism)that risks beingelidedunder the designation ofworld literature. As Elleke Boehmer(2014)has remarked,world literature isoften taken as synonymous with, orasa replacement for, the postcolonial(299),a move that could, she suggests, be in part due toa contemporary discomfort withthe latter’sperpetuallycritical stance(306);world literatureisconsidered to bemoreneutral. It is seen asfocused on the literary rather than the political or ethical(Albrecht 2013; Young 2014), with the result thatthe critical concerns of postcolonialism, which are maintained in tension with the commercial appropriation of the exotic,can bepassed over(Boehmer 2014, 306).It is for this reason, in part, that Hugganhasmore recently described world literature as"too much asymptomof the oftenprofoundly anti-democratic and neo-imperialist tendencies within globalization"(2011,491, emphasis in original).
The tensionbetweenthe"world"and the"postcolonial"that Morgan'simagery of explorationevokesissalient for thestudy ofethics in world literaturesincepostcolonialism isparticularlydistinctivein itsethical commitments. Robert Youngcomments that while world literature makes a claim to universality through its conception of literature"of such quality and insight that it transcends its local context to establish itself as universal, shared by all cultures"(2014,213–214), postcolonial literature, with its focus on the local and particular,nevertheless"achieves a certain universality through its relation to the ethical"(218).[1]The ethical (or what could be termed the ethico-political,sinceits concernsarealsopolitical"in its broadest sense"[218]) constitutes one of the main focal points of debatesbetweenworld and postcolonial literature. We have already seen something of thedisquiet ofpostcolonialismat its gradual supplantationby world literaturedue to theerasureof the ethical.It is important to note, however,that this ethical concernin postcolonial studieshas generally been dominated bysingularity, or the relation with alterity(or otherness).
We can observe this ina dialogue between David Damrosch and Gayatri Spivak on world literature(Damrosch and Spivak 2011). Damrosch'sargumentpivots around concernsabouttranslationand reading works in their original languages, the necessity for collaborative work in the study of world literature,and the importance of theoretical pluralism, allseenas attemptsto move beyond the situationof"American specialists presuming to put together world anthologies, and[…]the publishing conglomerates trying to Americanize the world". Damrosch, however,relativises thissituationby arguing that such anthologies were never meant for the"global market",since,in publishing,the"global rights [cost] twice as much as the North American rights". Consequently,"capitalism itself"has safeguarded the rest of the world"from the invasion of American world literature anthologies"(457).He is thus abletorelocate thisapparentglobal inequality onto the relationships between ivyleague and other universitieswithin the United States,which hedescribesas"neocolonial"(460), and diagnosestheseproblems, not as global, butas symptomatic ofboth comparative and world literaturecoursesin the United States,when"either is done badly"(464).
Spivak, by contrast,is not concerned with"how to situate the peaks of the literary production of the world on a level playing field", which is Damrosch's focus, but instead"to ask what makes literary cases singular. The singular is always universalizable, never the universal.The site of readings is to make the singular visible in its ability"(Damrosch and Spivak 2011,466).What Spivak resists here in her discussion with Damrosch is incorporating works of literature into a universal or world system where the text's singularity is consequently lost. As Lorna Burns(2015)glossesit:"what is at stake in Spivak's intervention in world literature and what marks her difference is alterity and ethics.Hers is a reframing of world literature that retains the critical gains made by postcolonial theory"(243).Spivak thus, in concurrence with hermoregeneral commitment to ethical singularity,[2]goes onto commentthat"the ethical reflex is to go toward the other, and literature doesn't teach you that, but literature allows you to train for that"(Damrosch and Spivak 2011, 482).
Thisdialogue between Damrosch and Spivak is illustrative of the tension between world literature and postcolonial literaturecentredon an ethics of singularity.Such a privileging of alterityhas itself been a focus of criticismofpostcolonialism, both internally and externally. Monika Albrecht(2013), for instance,argues thatsomepostcolonialism neglects the more literary aspects of texts,producing"predictable criticism"that is"remarkably superficial in its literary analyses"(52), as well as, in the words of Neil Lazarus,"a fetishizing [of]difference under the rubric of incommensurability"(quotedin Albrecht 2013, 53).Iwillconsiderthe question of an ethics of singularityin literary criticism in more detailbelowbutthe approach to ethical criticismthat Idevelop inthis bookis put to work within this tension between world and postcolonial literature. Insisting on the ethicalin world literature, and the importance of the debates that surround it within postcolonialism,Iagree, to an extent, with arguments such as Albrecht's. I thereforecontendfor a widening of the scope of the ethicalthat maintains the concerns of postcolonialism, but which simultaneouslyfocuseson narrative form—specifically the functioning of recognition.To fill in the details of what exactly I meanby thiswill take usonadetourthroughthe details of postcolonial ethics and the particular problems I see with an ethics of singularity (beyond simply claiming, as Albrecht does,a repetitiveness of conclusions), as well as a subsequent discussion of the approach I will develop over the course of this book. Finally, I will considerKazuo Ishiguro'sThe Remains of the Day.A prominent text in both world and postcolonial literature, which has also been the focus of analysis from divergent perspectives on ethical criticism, it is primed to illustrate more concretely the ethical approachto world literaturethat I develop.
II
Since what is meant by the term"postcolonial"has been the focus of much debate, it is worthstatingthat its use in this book follows Stuart Hall(1996), who argues that the concept of the postcolonial—deployed at"a high level of abstraction"—helps to mark the (uneven) historical and epistemological"transition from the age of Empires to the post-independence or post-decolonisation moment"(246); or, in Peter Hulme's words, the"process of disengagement from the whole colonial syndrome"(quotedin Hall 1996, 246). Postcolonial literature is, therefore, understoodas writing"which critically or subversively scrutinizes the colonial relationship. It is writing that sets out in some way or another to resist colonialist perspectives[and]to undercut thematically and formally the discourses which supported colonization"(Boehmer 2005, 3). While such a definition has some difficulty accounting for works which might be considered postcolonial—since coming from a former colony—but are not necessarily critical of the legacies of empire (suchasthe work of V.S.Naipaul), what this indicates is the fact that"postcolonial literature as a field is never neutral"(Young 2014, 219). The ethical concerns of postcolonial literaturesare thosepredominantly aimed at a critique of imperialism and its legacies.
Whilepostcolonialismcan be understood to bedistinctive in its ethical commitment, the presence of ethical concerns within postcolonial (or, indeed, world) literature should not besurprising.As already noted, postcolonial literature,as literature,participatesin a long tradition in whichthe assertion of ethical positions isprominent. In one respect this is due to the fact that novels areinescapablyethically committed—particularlyrealist novels,whichinpresentingdescriptions of reality represent the ethical side of life,even if these representations are sometimes reductively simple or crass(Phelan 1996). As Abraham Yehoshua(2005)observes,"whether we like it or not, every artistic work that deals with human relations has in it a moral aspect because all human relationships may be evaluated according to moral categories"(18).However even the most abstract, nonconventional or"unrealistic"work of literature implies an ethics: at the very least it implies that it isworthtaking the time to engage with it rather than doing something else. AsWayneBooth(1988)argues,
Each work of art or artifice, even the simplest wordless melody, determines to some degreehow at least this one moment will be lived.The quality of life in the moment of our"listening"is not what it would have been if we had not listened. We can even say that the proffered work shows us how our momentsshouldbe lived. If the maker of the art work did not believe that simply experiencing it constitutesasuperior form of life, why was the work created and presented to us in the first place?(17)
Thisethical stance of all literature,at onceimplicitandexplicit,is as it were the baseline of ethical criticism and is developed in different ways by various critics.
Within the form of narrative prose that is the purview of this study, however, postcolonial literature finds itself in a doublebind:thecriticism ofcolonialism is undertaken through theuse of EuropeanandEnlightenment ideals and forms. Indeed, the spread of the novel form around the globe, disseminated as part of educational syllabi, was in large part due to its use in the cause of imperialism. As Appiah(1992)notes,
When the colonialists attempted to tame the threatening cultural otherness of the African[…]the instrument of pedagogy was their most formidable weapon.[….]Colonial education, in short, produced a generation immersed in the literature of the colonisers, a literature which often reflected and transmitted the imperialist vision.(87)
The literature of Europe was used by colonialists toexercise control overthe colonised.[3]And this legacy is still strong, as can be seen by the continued use of the novel form—oftenwritten in the languages of Europe—aconnectionthatis strengthened through this traditionformingan object of critique. Yet, during the anti-colonial struggles and after the end of direct colonial rule,"European languages and European disciplines have been'turned', like double agents, from projects of the metropole to the intellectual work of postcolonial cultural life"(Appiah 1992, 88).As Boehmerputsit, since literature"contributed to the making, definition and clarification"of colonialist ideas(2005,5),there has been a corresponding"intervention by colonized people in the fiction and myths that presumed to describe them"(6).It isthusthrough its deployment in the service ofwhat we might callpostcolonial ends that postcolonial literature is marked as such; anditisfor this reason, despite this double bind,thatwhat can be described asdistinctive aboutthe postcolonial novel'sethicsisitsconcern withcritiquing and underminingthe legacies andepistemologiesof colonialism.
Thisgesture of using colonial forms to critique colonialism is an aporiathatis poignantly felt in philosophy, particularly in ethics. In considering the ethical impetus of postcolonial criticism and literature, it becomes clear thatuniversalEnlightenment idealsare at work.AsChakrabarty(2000)observes,
Modern social critiques of caste, oppressions of women, the lack of rights for labouring and subaltern castes in India, and so on—and, in fact, the very critique of colonialism itself—are unthinkable except as a legacy, partially, of how Enlightenment Europe was appropriated in the subcontinent.(4)
Theuse of Enlightenmentconceptsin the criticism of colonialism and its legacies isubiquitous inpostcolonial criticism.Part of the difficultywith these conceptsis their pretence to universalism: the problem is not that Europe has these ideals, but that they were, and are,taken as applicable to all different cultures. As such,the need is fortrue universals, not European values masquerading asuniversal(Appiah 1992).Nevertheless,the need for universals remains, and there have been important arguments madeby theorists,such as Peter Hallward(2001, 177–178),thatifwe abandon them,it is only a matter of timebeforeright becomes equated with might.Together with the need to work towards universals,however,there is alsoasimultaneousobligationto focus upon, and do justice to, the particular and idiosyncratic, a demandthatisinseparable frompostcolonialism(Hallward 2001; Shohat 1992).As will become clear, these two central tensions—theinterplay between the universal and the particular,and the simultaneous useand critique of Enlightenmentconcepts, what David Scott(2004)calls"the paradox of colonial Enlightenment"(131)—are integral to an ethics that addresses postcolonial concerns without over emphasizing singularity.[4]
In the Levinasian/Derridean understanding of ethics, from where the ethics of singularity is often sourced, the ethical is distinct from the political and the moral: the latter two have to do with general questions of conduct in the political and the social realm, what Levinas calls the realm of the third; the former has to do with an unregulated, undetermined openness and address to the singular other. As Derrida phrases it in an interview,"when I try to think the most rigorous relation with the other I must be ready to give up the hope for a return to salvation, the hope for resurrection, or even reconciliation"(Kearney 2004, 3). Any expectation of what the other should be like (just, kind, generous, etc.) or what the relation to the other should result in (reconciliation, salvation, etc.) begins to determine the relation, which is to slip out of the ethical, characterised by a radically open and undetermined hospitality, and into the political and juridical. For Levinas and Derrida, this unspecified relation to the other has the character of infinite responsibility and is the source of (though not the recipe for) law and morality/ethics as these are commonly understood.
One of themostsystematicdevelopmentsofsuch anethics of singularitywithinliterarycriticismis perhaps that byAdam Newton(1995)in hisNarrative Ethics.For Newton,"narrative ethics implies simply narrativeasethics: the ethical consequences of narrating story and fictionalizing person, and the reciprocal claims binding teller, listener, witness, and reader in that process"(11).ForLevinas(1998), the ethical and therealmof the third can berespectivelydesignated by the"saying"and the"said",both of which are simultaneously present in our relation totheotherin language."Saying"isthe pure relation between the self and other, themoment of encounter that is therelation to therevelation of theface, that is, the revelation of the other as resisting and exceeding any determinations we might wish to impose on it. It is"the proximity of one to the other, the commitment of an approach, the one for the other,the very signifyingness of signification"(5, my emphasis). The"said"is thethematic content of the saying, the usual focus of our interactions with others which subordinatesto itselfthe"saying"even in its very moment of revelation(7).Applying thisdistinctiontoliterature,Newtonlocates his narrative ethics inits"saying"—thatis, the moment of encounteror contactwhen one readsa text. Heexplains,"One faces a text as one might face a person, having to confront the claims raised by that very immediacy, an immediacy of contact, not of meaning"(Newton 1995, 11).
There are threeaspectsthatNewtonspecifies in hisnarrative ethics, giving it a"triadic structure":"narrational ethics","representational ethics",and"hermeneutic ethics"(1995,17–18). All three are closely intertwined. The first, narrational ethics,is the"relational"aspectof reading, the encounter with the"saying"of the text"and the intersubjective responsibilities and claims which follow from acts of storytelling". Representational ethics designates"the costs incurred in fictionalizing oneself or others by exchanging'person'for'character'"(18), while hermeneutic ethics is closely connected to this,and designates the"responsibilities incurred in each singular act of reading",responsibilities that accrue around the risk of representing other people.Integratingthem,we mightsay that for Newton, as soon as we pick up a book we are forced to respond to it regardless of its content, in the same way that we must respond to a person, regardless of what they say: responsibility—theobligation to respond—comesbefore we are aware exactly whatit iswe are responsiblefor. This responsibility is, however, primarily to do with the risks of representing others, giving us the hermeneutical responsibilityofnavigatingthe tension between both trying to"get"the other's story, and the"lesson that'getting'someone else's story is also a way of losing themas'real,'as'what he is'"(19), that is to say, of replacinga relation to the face, in Levinas'ssense,which always exceeds our comprehension, with a relation to itsimagewhich is comprehensible.We will see what thismeans fortheethicalreading of a novelwhen we delve deeper into Ishiguro'sThe Remains of the Dayin a moment.The question ofthe ethics ofrepresentation,the ethics of the image, is a centralconcern for Levinas, though,and oneto which I will return.
Itshouldbe clearthat Newton's approach is notovertlyconcerned with the thematic engagements of novels, which is to saythathis concern with contenthas to do withthe wayin whichtheseethical responses in reading aredramatised(Newton 1995, 67–68).Derek Attridge's(2004a)approachto ethicsin hisJ.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Eventhas certain similarities to Newton's.Attridge does not consider contact with the text itself as anecessarily ethical moment. Nevertheless, hesimilarlydeploysa Levinasian/Derridean conception of the other as exceedingourcomprehension,arguingthat an experience ofalterity can occur inthereadingofnarrative.For Attridge, to speak about the ethics of literature isto speak about having an experience of otherness in the event of reading. This alterity is located in the originality or singularity of the piece of literature:"The experience of singularity involves an apprehension ofotherness, registered in the event of its apprehension, that is to say, in the mental and emotional opening that it produces"(Attridge 2004b, 67). The degree to which a work is original and singular is thus closely tied to the experience of alterity that it evokes, andsoalsoto its ethics. Some worksare more exemplary in this regard than others: the text that"most estranges itself from the reader, makes the strongest ethical demand"(Attridge 2004a, 11).Coetzee'slate modernist texts are for Attridge of this exemplary sort.
There is an intriguing section in the opening moves of Attridge'sargumentwhich indicates some of the distance between Attridge and Newton's approaches, andbegins to showwhy I consider Attridge's too restrictive.It occursin his discussion of the ethical and political benefit arising from the formal innovation of modernist texts.
To make this claim [about the ethics of formal singularity] is not to deny what has often been powerfully demonstrated: thatalarge part of modernist writing was insensitive to the otherness produced by patriarchal and imperialist policies and assumptions.[….]It is true that, with some notable exceptions, only in later developments of modernism have these [technical] resourcesbeen exploited in conjunction with a thematic interest in gender, race, and colonialism.(2004a,6)
Adistinctionis drawn herebetween the technical resources of form and an alignment of those resources with the meanings of the text.Thisis a concern with thematic content that is distinct from Newton's. However, it needs to be asked, how does this approach deal with the question of meanings and their impact on readers? Is a singular, innovative novel that is in its content insensitive to otherness ethical?WayneBooth putsit well when he comments,"It is not the degree of otherness that distinguishes fiction of the highest ethical kind but the depth of education it yields indealing withthe'other'"(1988:195). Is ethics in a novel, then, reducible to the text's formal singularity?
Attridgewants to disrupt the opposition between form and meaning. He argues that"the literary use of language involves theperformingof meanings and feelings, and that what has traditionally been called form is central to this performance"(2004a,9). Although it is accurate to connect the meanings of a text to its form, this does not answer the question of their significance. To note the inextricability of form and meaning does not eliminate the fact that the same formal resources and innovations can be (and have been) an inextricable part of texts that are insensitive to alterity. Interestingly, this recognition does not prevent Attridge from emphasizing the formal inventiveness of a text. The importance of formal singularity for Attridge, irrespective of the ethics of the text's meanings, can be seen as he shifts his focus from literature in general to Coetzee's work in particular.
Otherness, then, is at stake in every literary work, and in a particularly conspicuous way in the work that disrupts the illusions of linguistic immediacy and instrumentality. Among these works are some in which otherness is thematized as a central moral and political issue, and in these works modernist techniques may play a peculiarly important role. Coetzee's novels are cases in point.(12)
Despite the reiterationin this passageof the distance from Newton in the importance ofcontent,italso illustrates their proximity.Otherness, for Attridge, can be seenaspresent in"every literary work"(keeping inmindthat for Attridge"literature"refers to works that are singular), irrespective of either the work being a modernist text, or, importantly, of the work's meanings. The issue is formal singularity or originality, and works that have thematised otherness as a concern are a specific type within thisbroad categorization—adistinction that implicitly includes withinitthose texts which are insensitive to otherness. Attridge appears, then, to call texts ethical that in his own terms of sensitivity to alterity are arguably also(thematically)not so. To locate the ethics of a work primarily in its inventiveness, in its singularity,cantherefore be seen tooverlook key ethical aspects presentwithin its meanings.
It is not, it must be emphasised, that Attridge is unaware of other ethically salient aspectsin the novel. Thisbecomes explicit when he comments onthe"critique of colonialism and its avatars"inDusklandsandIn the Heart of the Country:
All this brutality and exploitation is certainly there in the novels to be felt and condemned, but it is not what makes them singular, and singularly powerful. Itis what they do, how they happen, that matters: how otherness is engaged, staged, distanced, how it is manifested[...].(30)
Whilethis approach isperhapseffectivefor Coetzee's work(though not exclusively so, as will be seen), it istoo restrictivefor literature in general precisely due tothis subordination of other ethical concerns to the manifestation of otherness,a subordinationwhich, as the above has shown,results fromthe ideathat"Modernism's foregrounding of language and other discursive and generic codes through its formal strategies"embodies the insight that"literature's distinctive power and potential ethical force"rests in precisely this opening"a space for the apprehension of otherness"(30).
What I find unsatisfactory about thesetwoapproaches,then, istherestriction of what is pertinentin reflectingupon the ethics of a novel.The exploration of environmental ethics and its tension with other ethical concerns in Amitav Ghosh'sThe Hungry Tide,which I will consider in the next chapter, cannot be reduced to a question of formal alterity, of evoking an experience of otherness, nor to the ethics of transforming people intocharacters. This is not to saythat these areentirelyabsent, orthat AttridgeandNewton's approaches areunproductive.Indeed,the relation to others is often a significant feature, as isindeedthe case inThe Hungry Tide. It is to suggest, instead, that this concern is present alongside other, equally important, ones.At the sametime,it is important toacknowledgethat my understanding of intersubjective relations is heavily indebted to the work of both Levinas and Derrida. Rather than rejecting their work, I am concernedwithbroadeningtheir applicability;I am in search of a pragmatic, strategic and context-based approach which will be productive in considering the multiplicity of specific ethical concerns present acrossworld/postcolonial novels.
An approach thatrecognises the variety of ethical concerns, and which will clarify an additional difficulty that I have with Newton'sand Attridge's approaches,is presented by James Phelan(2005)in his bookLiving to Tell About it.For Phelan, narrative is an act of communication:"somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something happened"(18).Narratives are therefore understood to be"designed by authors in order to affect readers in particular ways", and readingconsequentlyinvolvesthe reader in a"feedback loop"between the"authorial agency, textual phenomena, and reader response"(18–19). The navigation of this"feedback loop"and the correlating"communication from author to audience"entails a full engagement from the readers,requiringtheir"intellect, emotions, psyche, and values"—anengagement that unfolds in tandem with the"narrative progression"(19).It is within these layered interactions with narrative that Phelan locates its ethics. In first person or character narration, whichhisstudy focuses on, the ethical situation is particularly complex,calling for a response from the reader to the characters themselves,tothe narrator's stance towards the characters and the reader, andtothe implied author's stance towards the narrator, the characters and the reader(20). What this suggests, and which will be seeninThe Remains of the Day,is that the ethical emphasis is on how readers navigate the textual situation and all its attendant connections.Which is to say that while the narrative's representation of ethical situationsisimportant, themain ethical question is how the reader negotiates this in termsof his or her own values(22, n.16).
Although Phelan's approach is suitable for engaging with a diverse range of ethical concerns—andindeed he distances himself fromNewton because of his narrow focus(22)—Phelan'sfocus on narrative as an act of communication results in too much of an emphasison the author (implied or real) and the reader.I am in agreement with him about the importance of narrative sequence andtextual phenomenon to a novel's ethical sense. My interest, however, is in the understanding of ethics that is exploredas an argumentwithin the bounds of the text, rather thanprimarilythe ethical impact of a text upon a reader. The readerisof necessityfundamental tobothethics in literature andmy own analyses:an analysis of character progression within a narrative, of narrative structure and technique all assume the point of view of a reader. However, when the reader's responsedoes feature in my analyses it isin orderto sharpen the understanding of ethics that is at work within the narrative, primarily through considering the possible emotional impact ofitupon them—and my interestin suchcases is with the textual aspects that evoke the response. As such, it is accurate to say that I am invested in an understanding of narrative as a means of thinking through ethics, an understanding that is particularly productive inupholding the concerns ofpostcolonialism, and that takes its bearings from the work of Martha Nussbaum.
For Nussbaum(1990), novels can makea definite contributionto ethicsdue tothe presence of four features,the combination ofwhichcorrelatestoan Aristotelian understanding of ethics: the contingentandparticular, theimportance of the emotions, the incommensurability of goods, and the vulnerability of goodness.The first two features arise from thenovelformitself, whichemphasisestheemotions, and theparticularandcontingent:novels"offer a distinctive patterning of desire and thought, in virtue of the ways in which they ask readers to care aboutparticulars,and to feel for those particulars a distinctive combination of sympathy andexcitement"(236).The last twofeaturesare notco-extensive with the novel, yettheirpresence results ina novelpresenting, in its most complimentary form, the Aristotelian conception of ethics.[5]
Thelasttwoaspects—theincommensurability of goods and vulnerability of goodness—canbestbe illustrated fromGreektragedy, particularly Aeschylus'Agamemnon. The contingencies of life (in this case theconflicting wills of the gods) result in a situation where Agamemnon is under an equal demand from incommensurable goods: the life of his daughter and a divine command from Zeus. Having gathered his army to fulfil Zeus'commandto conquer Troy, the expedition is becalmed by the goddess Artemis.As aresult,starvation sets in and the only way to bring the needed wind is, by Artemis'command,for Agamemnon tosacrifice his daughter Iphigenia.Agamemnonmust eitherrefuse to sacrifice his daughter, andin addition to defying the will of Zeuseveryone will die of starvation; or he performs a horrific act and the lives of his men are spared and heis able tofulfil Zeus's command. Either way, he is guilty: the contingencies of life have brought two incommensurable goods into conflict,with the result that the goodness of Agamemnon is impacted by that which is outside of his control. Nussbaum comments,
We can see that one choice, the choice to sacrifice Iphigenia, seems clearly preferable, both because of consequences and because of the impiety involved in the other choice. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that Agamemnon could rationally have chosen any other way. But both courses involve him in guilt.(34)
This is, as Charles Taylor(1988)notes, an understanding of ethics quite contrary to Utilitarianismin that the moral goods in question are not commensurable:[6]"There is a good here of a particular kind,unsubstitutableby military success or divine favour, which remains forever destroyed and defiled"(807).It is thereforeparticularlysignificantthat while Agamemnon is not held responsible for the sacrificing of his daughter—itis the gods who are primarily to blame—heis held responsible for the"inference from the necessity of the act to its rightness, and the rightness of supportive feelings"(Nussbaum 1986, 36). Agamemnon thinks thatbecause this is the correct action to take there can be nothing abominable about it, and thus concludes that sacrificing his daughter ceases to be wrong and does the deed with joy. It is for this, Nussbaum shows,that Agamemnon is held responsible and criticised(35–37).
This conception of ethics is further expanded with the importance of the particular or contingent and the emotions. Nussbaum arguesthatfor Aristotle,"Principles[...]fail to capture the fine detail of the concrete particular, which is the subject matter of ethical choice"(300–301). Principles, orgeneralmoral rules, are insufficient for navigating the contingencies of practical life. This isprimarilybecause"practical matters",where ethical decisions are made,"are in their very nature indeterminate or indefinite"(302), butisalso due to the possibility of encountering"particular and non-repeatable events"(304).The result is that there is always something of a distance between the general rule and the practical, contingent scenario in which a choice must be made.Ethical choices mustthereforeof necessitybe guided byphronêsis,or practical wisdom, for whichgeneral rules are useful"only as summaries and guides;[practical wisdom]must itself be flexible, ready for surprise, prepared to see, resourceful at improvisation"(305). As Taylorsummarises,"Moral understanding cannot be conceived simply as a grasp of truths or principles. To know what to do is to know this in a particular situation, and the relevance of no particular situation can be exhaustively captured in a set of rules"(1988,810).
It isfor navigating these particular, practical situations that the emotions become crucial. Nussbaumwrites,"The experienced person confronting a new situation does not attempt to face it with the intellect'itself by itself'. He or she faces it, instead, with desires informed by deliberation and deliberations informed by desire, and responds to it appropriately in both passion and act".Situations are marked for us by our desires;the"very way things present themselves to our desires"enables us to discern contours of pleasure and pain, the"to-be-pursued and the to-be-avoided"(1986,308).Without ourfeelingsfulfilling this role, the skill ofphronêsisfails. This does,however,require a specific understanding ofourdesires or emotions, one that acknowledges what Nussbaum in a later study calls their intelligence.[7]For Aristotle,"emotions are individuated not simply by the way they feel, but, more importantly, by the kinds of judgements or beliefs that are internal to each". Thus anger can beunderstood asa"composite of painful feeling with the belief that one has been wronged". If it later becomes clear that the offense was imagined, then the feeling ofanger would subside. If it did not, we would consider the lingering emotionas"irrationalirritationor excitation, not asanger". In fact, it is this understanding of emotions that allows one to assess them as rational or irrational,"depending upon the nature of their grounding beliefs"(383).In this light, Aristotle'sfamous commentson the catharsis of pity and fear experienced byanaudience while viewing tragedy gains added significance:understanding catharsis as"clearing up"(389),the presence ofpity and fearindicates an increase in self-understanding.ForNussbaum, therefore,our emotions are able to reveal to us insights about values thatcannot be grasped by theintellect alone:
clarification, for [Aristotle], can certainly take placethroughemotional responses[...].Just as, insideAntigone, Creon's learning came by way of the grief he felt for his son's death, so, as we watch a tragic character, it is frequently not thought but the emotional response itself that leads us to understand whatourvalues are.(390)
This understanding of the intelligence of the emotions will be indispensable for my analyses over thecourse of this book. What can be concludedat this pointis that thenovelasa form is able to engage with ethical questions in an Aristotelian way, creating detailed descriptions of specific, unrepeatable scenarios which require an emotional response, and which can often (but donot necessarily always) represent a conflict of incommensurable goods.The usefulness of this conception of ethicsfortheconcerns ofpostcolonialismis in part due to itpayingheed to the particular, without neglecting the universal, whichis what I endeavour to accomplishbyrelating the specific explorations of ethics in each novel tothree general ethical themes. Before turning to them,there aretwo additional ways in which this understanding of ethicswill prove productive.
First,the conceptionof the ethical subject and the good which is presented hereisquitedistinctfrom that expounded by Kant and other thinkers of the Enlightenment—afact which DavidScott notes. For Scott(2004), Greek tragedy—andNussbaum reads Aristotle as a"re-articulation"of the understanding of ethics presented in tragedy(Charles Taylor 1988, 809)—canbe used"as an interpretive framework for reconceiving conventional (largely Kantian) assumptions about moral agencyand its implications for our understanding of justice, community, identity, history, and so on"(Scott 2004,175). It isprimarilythe incommensurability of the good and the fragility of goodness that enable this.Whatthese two featuresrevealisthat"we are not entirelyin controlof our lives. Rather, tragedy presents us with a picture of ourselves as simultaneously authors of our ends and authored by forces and circumstances over which we have no—orlittle—rationalcontrol"(182). Human beings are both passive and active, shaped and shapers, able to subject our environment to control and vulnerable to contingency and that which exceeds our control. This is a crucial displacement of a fully autonomous(humanistic)Enlightenment subject.This displacement isemphasisedby the possibility of conflicting goods:"We may be essentially good people, have good characters, but acting in the world necessarily presents us with situations that are anomalous or that make conflicting and incommensurable demands on us"(185). Scott, then,is interested inhow tragedy works todisplay the degree to which autonomy is delimited; he is also, however, interested in the structure of these tragic moments, as a model for engaging with the legacy of the Enlightenment, which brings us to the second point.
The Enlightenment, as I noted, presents us with a paradox: many of the resources of the Enlightenment are used to contestitslegacy.[8]In tragic terms, thepositive and the negative are inextricable. Scottarguesthat"the important point about tragedy is precisely thatas a discursive and institutional formit embodied in a compelling way a distinctive capacity for ambiguity and paradox, a capacity to look in several directions at once"(187). In addition, tragedy also"warned of the mind's propensity for theoretical closure"(187; see also Nussbaum 1986, 23–84). The model of tragedy (and particularly, in Scott's use, the tragedy of Oedipus) thus
makes a contribution to a kind of enlightenment thinking that sustains and even celebrates enlightenment virtues while at the same time opposing enlightenment hubris and the enlightenment drive to normalize and discipline the very subjects it seeks to emancipate and empower.(188)
The ability of tragedy to host paradox, ambiguity and incommensurability thus keeps theirresolvabletension between the Enlightenment's"good"and its"bad"productively alive.
Thisis then afurther advantage ofthis approach to ethics(both inthe noveland ingeneral)forpostcolonial criticism,required as it isnot onlytonegotiate the tension between the universal and the particular,but alsothe"paradox of colonial enlightenment"(131).This is not to saythat Iam solely concerned withsuch clear moments of tragic conflict. While this understanding of ethicsunderpins this study andwill be particularly useful in the analysis of Ghosh'sThe Hungry Tide,where there is an explicit conflict of two values, what I amprimarilyconcerned with is the tragic as a figure of ethical impurity. In her lecturesReligion and Literature, Helen Gardner(1971)provides a useful overview of different understandings of tragedythat will assist in clarifying what I mean. What is common totheoriesof tragedy, Gardnernotes, isthat it"includes, or reconciles, or preserves in tension, contraries"(24); the varietyin theoriesof tragedyrestsprimarily in whateachoneunderstandsthis conflicttosignify. For some, of whom the best instance is Hegel,theconflict—asfor Nussbaum—existsbetween ideals and isultimatelycomforting:
thatthough [tragedy] shows us a world of mutability and irrationality, it shows us in the end a world that has meaning and rationality and is governed by laws. Somewith crudity and others with subtletyhave attempted to find in tragedy a justification of the universe as ultimately making sense.(25–26)
In this understanding, the conflictexpressed in tragedy is revealed as meaningfully part of a greater rationality,rather thanexhibiting barechaos.A somewhat less consoling understanding is located in the work ofthe"Glasgow School",for whomtragedy"vindicates the universe only in the sense that it displays a universe that provides the opportunity for the existence, and the exercise, of virtue"(28):virtues are not part of a grander rationality, but exist only for themselves.However, the most austere theories are found in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. For Schopenhauer,"the end of tragedy is to display the'terrible side of life'and by so doing give us'a significant hint of the nature of the world and of existence'"(29).Instead of revealing an order that supersedes the chaos of conflict,tragedy exposes something of how the worldtrulyis.Nietzsche's theory is similar, though more"thrilling and beautiful"(30):"Tragedy is to him'the art of metaphysical comfort', reconciling us to life by showing it as a sublime spectacle, and to the universeasawork of unmoral art"(31).Revealing something of the"unmoral",chaoticcharacter of the universe, tragedyfor Nietzsche iscomforting—butdue toproducingacceptance in the viewer,rather than exhibitinga greater rationalitythat orders the universe.
Gardnerconcludes her overview withtheformulaof tragedyshe considers the most persuasive, put forward by Beethoven:
scrawled, perhaps in jest, above the opening bars of the last movement of his last quartet:'Muss es sein?'[Should it be?]'Es muss sein.'[It should be] He wrote above the whole movement the words'Der schwer gefasste Entschluss''the Difficult Resolution'.(34)
What differentiates the question and the answer is"hardly more than an inflection of the voice[...]Protest and acceptance are like expressions on the same face"(34).The conjunction of affirmation and rejection, of positive and negative—thedifficultyof which Gardner speaks here—iswhatis of interest to me.In the forthcoming analyses there are frequent instances of ethical difficulty where evil and good are not easilydecidable, decided upon,orseparated: from clashes of valuesinThe Hungry Tide, to morally ambiguous charactersinHalf of a Yellow Sun, to thedramatizationof ethical failuregiving rise to ethical affirmationinCrossing the River. And it is in this generalised senseof tragedyas a figure ofimpurity, thatIcharacterisethe ethical explorations in these novels asbearinga tragic character.
There is, then, ageneralizableimpurity to ethics that can be seen in specific circumstances, from moments of conflicting values, to ethical affirmations that have ethical failure as their condition ofpossibility. And it is in these terms that I can now clarify what is meant when I speak of the ethical sense of a novel. Rejecting, as Booth(1988)has persuasively shown ethical criticism should, any reductive approach to ethics in the novel,"ethical sense"gestures towards a more complete understanding of a novel's exploration of ethics, beyond any extrapolated"moral".A moralcan of course always be extracted, and indeedthere is often adiscerniblecentral concernin a novel.It isimportant though,to enrich this by attention to the progression, character development, and narrative detailof the text. The ethical senseisthereforetaken to refer to the engagement with ethics, and the explorations of the difficulties of ethical impurity,in the novel as a whole; it refersto the sense of ethical life captured within it. And if there is adiscernible"point",neither canthe ethical sense becompletelyreduced to it,norcanitbe arrived at without the attention to detail and narrative progression whichconsequentlyoccupy much of the space in the coming analyses.
In order to bring out the ethical sense,my analyseswillfocus primarily on the movement of recognition withinthe text.Recognitionisa focal point for numerousgeneraldebates: the recognition of human value,the recognitionof individual and/or political identity,[9]the recognition of animal value, and the problem of recognizing too easily and completely. Recognition asanagnorisis,as a structural feature of fiction, however, is caught up with the particular,and often emotive,aspects of a narrative. Insofar asanagnorisiscan be characterised as a more dramatic recognition,bringing these two senses of the term into proximity leads to a productive movement between them:structural recognition scenes can be seen to be crucialtothematic moments for the novel's ethical sense, raising the important question of the overlap, or lack thereof, betweenmoral recognitionsandanagnorisis.
As these definitions suggest, my use ofanagnorisistakes its bearings from Terence Cave's(1988)extensive studyRecognitions:
If anagnorisisisstill to be used in critical practice, the dispersal of its meanings has to be accepted as afait accompli. In those circumstances, the only way to recover some degree of rigour is precisely to chart the drift and the erosion and use the entire historical purview as an elaborate para-definition, a pluralistic configuration within which one can move from point to point without entirely losing one's bearings.(221–222, emphasis in original)
In other words, the various ways in whichanagnorisishas been used within the history of poetics, that is, the different types or objects of recognition, are gathered into a pluralistic definition of the term. Indeed, there is quite a range in the types of recognitions. They traverse from the more strictly Aristotelian recognition of a nominal identity, to the recognition of individualcharacter,through to the even more dispersed"recognition of an obscured or hidden state of affairs"(232).
Central toanagnorisisis the question of what is recognised.Anagnorisisis a formal feature of fiction, first discussed by Aristotle in thePoeticsalongside its siblingperipeteia.It marks a shift in the plot and is often the cause of the sudden, surprising change of circumstances designated byperipeteia. The clearistexample is Sophocles'Oedipus Rex. In the play, the sudden and unexpected reversal of circumstances (thesuicideof Oedipus'mother/wife, his self-blinding,and exile) is brought about by the recognition of his identity and the consequent recognition of his crimes of incest and patricide.The recognition scenehere clearlymarks a structural shift in the plot.However,anagnorisisis not always so dramaticnoralways so closely tied to the plot's climax. A good example of more diffuse recognitions would beTheOdyssey, where rather thanadramatic moment of recognition,there is"an extended anagnorisis and peripeteia"built up over a series of lesscomprehensivemoments of recognition, which effect a"gradual shift from ignorance to knowledge"(41).However, in both the"tragic"recognitionofOedipus Rexand the"epic"recognitionofThe Odyssey,"a recognition scene is not conceivable except asbotha structural shift and the exhibition of some object of knowledge"(225 my emphasis).It is precisely because the recognition scene is always the recognition of something or someone that it is open to being thematically filled by the fiction's concerns—includingits ethical preoccupations. As such, the question of what is recognised in a postcolonial novel, the predicate of the characters'revelations, becomes a useful lens through which to consider a novel'sengagement with the particulars that constituteits ethical and political concerns.
In addition to this significance for a novel's ethical sense, the recognitionscene as awayof knowingfurtheryieldssome important insights.Anagnorisis, as Cave argues, is a scandal, and a part of that scandal is due to the undermining the knowledge attainedthrough the means of acquiring it; the figure of recognition as a way of knowing is what Aristotletermsparalogismos: false reasoning(39–43). Recognition always requires a proof, some form of evidence, and except for the type which Aristotle considered the highest and best—recognitionbrought about by the necessary cause and effect of the plot—theproofs are various tokens or signs. Yet the problem is that these proofs are insufficient. The tokens of recognition often leadtobothrecognitions andmisrecognitions. The example of Odysseusis paradigmatic: Odysseus is recognised when one of the servants sees his scar; yet by this reasoningeveryone with a scar is Odysseus.The result of this is thateven when it is not thematised in the narrative, there isan inherent instability in the recognition scene: it can be seen to call into question the very knowledge it bestows.For this reason,recognitions relying upon tokens and signs were classed by Aristotle as inferior to the more"pure"recognitions arising from narrative cause and effect, without the use of signs(246–247). Rarely, however, do recognitions arise from philosophical reasoning, and this emphasisesthe contingent and the particular. It is worth quoting Cave at some length on this:
However skilfully [recognitions] may be integrated into a deductive sequence, they are always contingent in some sense[….]Yet they are seen to work, and their effectiveness often seems to depend on the fact that they emerge accidentally and unexpectedly: the marginal detail triggers the response of recognition where the more general resemblance fails. There could be no more graphic illustration of this than the sequence of recognition scenes in theOdysseywhere thecharactersremark on the'stranger's'resemblance to Odysseus but fail to draw the appropriate conclusion until the accidental discovery of an accidental scar.(250)
The importance of the particular and the contingent in recognition scenes brings them into a productive proximitywith the approach to ethics outlined above, not only in the importance of these two features, but alsointhe significance of the emotions. Ihavenoted, following Nussbaum, that our emotional responses cangive rise torecognitions.As such,anagnorisiscould assist infurtherdisplacing the Enlightenment ethical subject,not only through the importance of contingency—andthe possible emergence of a"tragic"understanding of ethics—butalso through being caused by characters'emotional responses. As Sara Ahmed(1998)notes,thisby itselfis afundamentalcritique of the Enlightenment ethical subject, which is typically maleand rejects the value of the emotions as"associated (negatively) with the feminine"(52–53).[10]This, as will be seen,isindeed the casein the works under consideration: repeatedly, characters navigate tragic ethical situations by relying on their emotional responses,which lead them torecognitionsthatalter their ethical understandingsand, in so doing, give shape to the novel's ethical sense.
This approach to ethical criticism is well suited to take account of the ethical concernsraised bypostcolonialism.There is one primary objection, however,that needs to be addressed. In discussing Adam Newton and Derek Attridge's approachesabove, both of whom draw on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, I noted the concernthatthe ethics of the imageholdsfor Levinas. It is duein parttothisconcern with over-determining the otherthrough representationthat Attridge, in a move common to postcolonialism,elevates an experience of otherness to the primary value, and that Newton specifies a hermeneutical ethics that grapples with the risks of transforming"person"into"character".In moving away from their approaches, it is important toacknowledgethat this is indeed a proper concern, especially for a field of study that isinvested inresisting and undercutting colonialist determinations. In positing recognition, and consequently gains in knowledge, as central to my ethical criticism, the question of certainty orof theillusion of grasping the other through recognition must be addressed.
A good instance of Levinas'schallenge to literature can be found in his essay"Reality and its Shadow"(1987).[11]As I have detailed, the ethical relationship for Levinas is the face-to-face. The face is the revelation of the other person in their infinity, that is, inmyrelationship to them even as they exceed every concept of them that I have. Nevertheless, we relate tothemandtothe rest of the material world,preciselythrough concepts by which"wemaintain a living relationship"(3).Art,however,does not relate to an object through its concept, but through its image.For Levinas,every being, every person,"bears on his face, alongside of its being with which he coincides, its own caricature, its picturesqueness". Even as we encounter a person or an object, their very materiality can be lifted like a second skin and made into an image:
Here is a familiar everyday thing, perfectly adapted to the hand which is accustomed to it, but its qualities, color, form, and position at the same time remain as it were behind its being, like the'old garments'of a soul which had withdrawn from that thing, like a'still life'.(6)
As aresult,there is a fundamental duality to all beings:"We will say the thing is itself and is its image". The imageisdifferent from asignor a symbol,since"thought stopson the imageitself"(6); it is opaque, drawing attention away froma fluid and living relationship tobeing,and towardsthefixity of the"old garments"of its image that it leavesbehind.In so doing, artistic disinterestedness, disengagement from the world,"is not the disinterestedness of contemplation but of irresponsibility"(12).Art is therefore caught up in this risk of irresponsibility.In substituting the image for the concept, we exchangetheliving relationship for one that is static, exchangingit foran"idol"(8). The image is suspended forever in its moment: the Mona Lisa will forever smile, but forever the smile that is aboutto
