SOURCE: "'After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness?': The Rise of Ethical Criticism," in Georgia Review, Vol. XLIII, No. 2, Summer 1989, pp. 395-405.

[In the following essay, Pinsker considers Coles' The Call of Stories in the context of ethical criticism and moral responses to literature.]

On Moral Fiction (1978), John Gardner's idiosyncratic, often downright cranky musing about contemporary fiction was so roundly hooted out of academe's groves that one began to wonder if he had not, in fact, hit a raw nerve. It was not only that his detractors protested far more about the book's self-serving, self-righteous moral posturing than the occasion required, but also that their attacks disguised an equally strong aversion to ethical criticism itself.

Saul Bellow—one of the few writers whom On Moral Fiction did not bash—takes a special pleasure in posing precisely the sort of moral questions that made the critics of Gardner's study so uncomfortable. "Has the filthy moment come," Moses Herzog asks in one of his characteristically agitated mental letters, "when moral feeling dies, conscience disintegrates, and respect for liberty, law, public decency, all the rest collapses in cowardice, decadence, blood?" After reading the brightest and the best of contemporary literary thought, one is tempted to tell Professor Herzog that there is good news and bad news: the good news being that the apocalyptic smashup he so worried about failed to materialize; the bad news turning out to be a long patch in which value words have had to duck for cover.

Indeed, the case against ethical criticism has become so much a part of the postmodernist landscape that those who raise questions about the link between literary structures and the larger rhythms of our moral life must show a pedigree at the door or find themselves dismissed either as hopelessly naive or as potential book burners. Those with pedigrees, (which is to say, those who have no trouble seeing the imagination as an ideological expression of, say, one's feminism or Marxism) move easily—some would say too easily—from culture to cultural politics. But even these critics tend to bristle when they are lumped together under the umbrella of "moral criticism." After all, it is one thing if a literary discussion is thick with talk of "privileging and empowering," but quite another when the conversation turns to which books are good or bad for people, and why. As Christopher Clausen puts it in a pioneering study of ethical criticism well worth a second (or for most readers, a first) look: "The effort of bringing an undogmatic moral criticism back to life, or rather of showing that it was only playing dead, is worthwhile for a number of reasons. The most important for literary purposes is that we should be clearer about what we are doing when we judge a book to be well or badly written."

Clausen, it now turns out, is not the only voice out to give moral criticism a renewed vitality. Wayne Booth has made something of a career as a public speaker by addressing literary problems that most critics wouldn't touch with ten-foot vita. The Vocation of a Teacher is a collection of occasional pieces delivered to a wide variety of audiences—fellow teachers, graduate students, nervous freshmen, and, of course, the General Public—over the span of years between 1967 and 1988. If Booth does not always regard as an unalloyed blessing the ancient Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times!" he does, at least, regard the interesting times of the last two decades, often fractious and increasingly divisive, as a bracing rhetorical challenge. And as any readers of Booth's earlier work (e.g., The Rhetoric of Fiction [1961]; The Rhetoric of Irony [1974]) can attest, Booth is a considerable rhetorician.

Interestingly enough, the lecture that set into motion the wheels of The Company We Keep—namely, a talk delivered at Hamilton College during the mid-1970's entitled "Can Art Be Bad for You?"—is not included in The Vocation of a Teacher. What matters, of course, is that Booth has continued to ask common-sense questions about the "kind of company we are keeping as we read or listen"—everything from "Am I willing to be the kind of person that this storyteller is asking me to be?" to "Will I accept this author among the small circle of my true friends?" For those who prefer to keep critical inquiry under tight wraps, these are dangerous questions, capable of turning a classroom discussion into a messy, altogether impressionistic affair. One might be willing to trust a Wayne Booth with such yardsticks, but not those who lack his wide reading and palpable sophistication.

Booth, however, welcomes exactly the sort of give and take feared by most critics, including those who normally side against the authoritarian. As he puts it, the aim of The Company We Keep is, first,

to restore the full intellectual legitimacy of our common-sense inclination to talk about stories in ethical terms, treating the characters in them and their makers as more like people than labyrinths, enigmas, or textual puzzles to be deciphered; and, second, it aims to "relocate" ethical criticism, turning it from flat judgment for or against supposedly stable works to fluid conversation about the qualities of the company we keep—and the company that we ourselves provide.

Booth is no slouch where it comes to providing us with the best that has been thought and said about critical theory or to unloading his own ideas about such topics as narrative structure, but he knows the value of occasion and anecdote. In this sense, The Company We Keep is a book out to make reading a human, and humane, activity. Booth's distinctive thumbprint appears on every page, in every paragraph—always reminding us of what is at stake when we give ourselves over to a "story."

He begins with an incident that has haunted him for some twenty-five years. It began innocently enough, as members of the University of Chicago's humanities teaching staff met to discuss the books to be assigned to the next batch of entering students. Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn had been on the list for years, and there was a general assumption that it would be on the list once again. But, as Booth tells the story, "suddenly the one black member of the staff, Paul Moses, an assistant professor of art, committed what in that context seemed an outrage: an overt, serious, uncompromising act of ethical criticism."

It's hard for me to say this [Moses began], but I have to say it anyway. I simply can't teach Huckleberry Finn again. The way Mark Twain portrays Jim is so offensive to me that I get angry in class, and I can't get all those liberal white kids to understand why I am angry. What's more, I don't think it's right to subject students, black or white, to the many distorted views of race on which that book is based. No, it's not the word "nigger" I'm objecting to, it's the whole range of assumptions about slavery and its consequences, and about how whites should deal with liberated slaves, and how liberated slaves should behave or will behave toward whites, good ones and bad ones. That book is just bad education, and the fact that it's so cleverly written makes it even more troublesome to me.

Moses' response has proved as "troublesome" for Booth as Huckleberry Finn was, and presumably still is, for Moses. The old reasons that Booth and his shocked colleagues trotted out twenty-five years ago—that Jim is the character closest to the book's moral center, that Twain's novel is as thoroughly antiracist as any one might imagine—remain good arguments, but Booth is no longer of a mind that Moses breached some unstated rule of academic decorum by venting his reservations: "I shall argue … that Paul Moses's reading of Huckleberry Finn, an overt ethical appraisal, is one legitimate form of literary criticism."

Moreover, Booth is well aware that taking Moses' position seriously (despite the fact that he continues to disagree with it) has consequences—not only for small, closed-door meetings but also for classrooms, for lecture halls, for the literary profession as a whole:

Such appraisals are always difficult and always controversial; those modern critics who banned them, at least in theory, from the house of criticism had good reason to fear what they too often spawn when practiced by zealots. Anyone who attempts to invite ethical criticism back into the front parlor, to join more fashionable, less threatening varieties, must know from the beginning that no simple, definitive conclusions lie ahead…. But if the powerful stories we tell each other really matter to us—and even the most skeptical theorists imply by their practice that stories do matter—then a criticism that takes their "mattering" seriously cannot be ignored.

In short, ethical criticism raises precisely the sort of embarrassing questions that formalist critics thought had been put to rest forever decades ago: Is this "poem" morally, politically, or philosophically sound? It is likely to work for good or ill in those who read it? Viewed in this way, ethical criticism may not be such a lonely enterprise after all, because in recent years its numbers have been swelled by feminist critics asking tough questions about a male-dominated canon and its effects on the consciousness of both men and women; by black critics whose challenges are at once more thorough-going and more thoughtful than Moses'; by neo-Marxists who challenge the class biases of European literary traditions; and by various religious critics who attack modern literature for its "nihilism."

Nor does it especially worry Booth that some practitioners of ethical criticism are likely to be simplistic or clumsy or just plain reductive. As long as the conversation about what we expect of a given book, and what the given book expects of us, remains conversation—as opposed to, say, efforts on behalf of censorship—he figures the result will be a generation of more engaged, and therefore better, readers.

The Company We Keep is a powerful argument, not only for its contention that literature can make something happen (it can, for example, teach us to "desire better desires"), but also for its abiding faith that literature can be a means of experiencing life more intimately, more deeply, more importantly, than most of us have imagined possible or permissible. Furthermore, Booth's arguments do not depend upon our agreeing with his intricate breakdowns of authors and readers (no less than three in each camp) or his distinctions between what he calls "hypocrisy downward" (in which author, reader, or both pretend to be worse off than they really are) and "hypocrisy upward," in which the claims about disinterest or unselfishness are out of kilter with their source. To be sure, Booth is as persuasive about the nuts and bolts of his mechanics of reading as he is about the more general issue of an ethics of criticism, but what matters most in The Company We Keep will linger long after Booth's line separating an "implied" from an "immediate" author blurs.

That we are up to our eyeballs in competing literary theories and the claims of special-interest politics is hardly as newfangled a condition as we might think. Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier (1528) is, among other things, a book of worries, and none pressed harder than the realization that "it is so difficult to know what true perfection is that it is well-nigh impossible; and this is due to the diversity of our judgments…. Everyone praises or blames according to his own opinion, always hiding a vice under the name of the corresponding virtue, or a virtue under the name of the corresponding vice." Booth's steady, gentle insistence—always buttressed by copious footnotes and elaborate bibliographies—that Don Quixote "might have been rescued by reading Don Quixote, that Emma Bovary's best hope would have been to read Madame Bovary," is a badly needed testament to the powers that reading rightly might have for us. Reading, for Booth, remains what it has always been—namely, an intensely human activity, one in which talk about characters and even about authors quite naturally includes estimations of our approval and disapproval:

… I have never come to a point of trusting him [Norman Mailer] as a friend. That is partly a matter of my disagreeing with some of his views about the kind of sympathy we should grant Gary Gilmore. But it is even more my sense of an untroubled incoherence, and hence untrustworthiness, in this career author. I know much less about the "real" [Ann] Tyler than I know about the public image "Norman Mailer," or about the career author I have met in reading most of his books. "My" Tyler's range and daring are much more limited than "my" Mailer's, but I feel that she is giving me everything she's got, and she cares a great deal about what will become of me as I read. My Mailer, in contrast, is simply playing games with me; he does not care a hill of beans for my welfare—he would obviously be happy to sacrifice me and any other reader to further his own ends.

In Booth's eminently sensible sentences I get the point, and I can even agree with him, although I am not so sure that I would want to encourage, or to read, a handful of sophomore papers that hold forth on "their" Kafka or "their" Joyce. Moreover, I can think of authors who are good company between hard covers, but who would probably make lousy dinner companions and downright horrific weekend guests.

No one will seriously question Booth's abilities as a close, ethical reader, but there are times when one wonders if ingenuity and enthusiasm have not combined to blur his judgment. In a chapter explaining how he came to be a "lukewarm Lawrentian" (a term that the rhetorician in Booth must surely recognize as an oxymoron), Booth keeps rereading Lawrence and applying his own principles about "unreliable narrators" and "implied authors," until, one by one, the old objections to Lawrence's bombast and to the tedious—and, in my opinion, ethically dangerous—philosophizing that mars much of Lawrence's work simply drop away; and Booth finds himself

… conversing with a peculiarly insistent, passionate, and wide-ranging friend, one who will respond in some interesting way to every important question I can think of. Some of our real-life friends—and they can be among our best—simply rule out certain topics from our conversation. Literary friends are like that, too. I don't expect to converse with the implied E. M. Forster about African art, let's say, or about how elementary education should be conducted. I don't converse with Jane Austen or Henry Fielding about depth psychology, and I don't talk with Henry James about metaphysics.

Quite so, Mr. Booth. One can converse with the implied D. H. Lawrence about anything, although I would suggest that you avoid bringing up certain topics—for example, blood consciousness, or how like-minded souls can effect a Blutbrüderschaft.

Booth's arguments on behalf of choosing good literary company widen considerably in Tobin Siebers' The Ethics of Criticism, a survey of contemporary critical theories that posits a long-standing connection between criticism and ethics. Indeed, ethical concerns become for Siebers the subtext that effectively unites widely differing theoretical schools into a hitherto unrecognized common cause. Moreover, the philosophical ground on which much of modern critical theory stands—the moral legacies of Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, and Freud—is likewise concerned with those choices that "bring the critic into a special field of action: the field of human conduct and belief concerning the human."

Granted, modern critical theory may speak in a discourse largely concerned with issues of language, but as Siebers points out, "behind its definitions lie ideals of human character":

The slippage between the autonomy of human will, proposed within the moral philosophy of Kant, and the autonomy of language, found in the New Criticism and poststructuralist theory, proves a most fertile ground for interrogating the character of language. What is at stake … in ethical criticism from Plato to pluralism and the ethics of autonomy is not merely the naming of a hidden ethos. The substitution of language for the self produces its own distinct moral dilemma because it has created a view of human consciousness in which ethical reflection is always destined to fail. The character of language promoted by theory today makes extremely difficult the type of consciousness necessary to moral reflection.

For Siebers; the ethics of criticism is at once a high-stakes game and a study of the means by which literary criticism affects the relation between literature and human life:

Violence is a human problem. It is never an infernal machine without a driver. It is never without a victim. If it may be called systematic, it is only so because it establishes languages and patterns of behavior that can be repeated by others.

Literary criticism would seem far removed from such matters. Its isolation in the little rooms of academia makes it a tame occupation, and many of the dangers now associated with criticism by those in search of a vicarious thrill would be laughable, given the state of terrorism and brutality in the world, if they were not so misguided.

However, as Siebers goes on to argue, language is power, and as such, it is one instrument of human violence. Consequently,

literary critics have a responsibility not only to supervise their own unjust practices as critics but to think about the ways in which language carries on the work of human prejudice, racism, sexism, classism, and nationalism.

What follows, perhaps predictably, is a tightly argued historical account that begins with Plato and makes appropriate stops to consider the contributions and failings of various critical "schools" (e.g., the Rousseauesque from Lévi-Strauss to Derrida, the Nietzschean dimensions of René Girard, and the French Freudianism of Jacques Lacan). The Ethics of Criticism ends with the good news about "nuclear criticism," first announced in the pages of Diacritics (Summer 1984), as a field uniting two aspects of ethical criticism—one that "reads other critical or canonical texts for the purpose of uncovering the unknown shapes of our unconscious nuclear fears"; and the other that "aims to show how the terms of the current nuclear discussion are shaped by literary or critical assumptions." Siebers has his quarrels with nuclear criticism, especially when it gives itself over to wholly negative representations (as he puts it, "The sentimentalist may be naive in singing songs of Melusina, but critical theorists are just as unintellectual in chanting Dies Irae"), but he also sees one clear advantage that has been conspicuously absent in most literary theories:

Nuclear criticism … contains the potential to read literature not against human interests but for them. Whereas poststructuralist theory has been defined principally as linguistic, in direct opposition to psychological and anthropological issues, nuclear criticism exposes the fact that the most abstract of theoretical designs and the most simple of literary ventures conceal human interest. The central human issues, for nuclear critics, are the value of the human community and the danger of its destructive tendencies. Nuclear criticism may therefore serve a double purpose. It provides a means of reading the ethical preoccupation of those literary artists and critics who declare most zealously their antagonism to ethics, and it asserts those principles of human community and opposition to violence so vital to the discussion of nuclear issues.

Surprisingly enough, Siebers gives the last words to literature rather than to criticism—and this after some 240 densely argued, cooly disinterested pages that constitute a criticism of criticism:

The nuclear metaphor [at the very center of the nuclear critic's panoramic vision] communicates in its care for life the wholly negative image of planetary death that literature has forever balanced with an ethical and aesthetic image of human life. To be human is to tell stories about ourselves and other human beings.

The finally human is literature.

In important ways Irving Massey's study begins where Siebers' ends—that is, in an effort to read Alexander Pope's teasing line, "Find you the virtue, and I'll find the Verse," against both the burdens and the benefits of a postmodernist sensibility. "Can one, then," Massey asks, "imitate virtue?" And furthermore,

should one … write about vice? (This is not an idle question.) Maybe there is not even a language for the Good, since language, like image, is at least partly a form of representation. Or, at least, since the Fall, as [Walter] Benjamin would have it, language, no longer pure creative Name, is tainted, and is unable to carry the force of the Good as such…. The question even arises whether literature as such, which must accept pure negativity as one of its possible poles, can claim a place within a consistently ethical scheme.

In Massey's deeply personal meditations on image and desire, questions abound. Has he confused the moral with the aesthetic? Sartre, for one, would insist that he has, and furthermore, that "The real is never beautiful"—for beauty requires a detachment from the world. In short, the Good cannot either be imaged or imagined; ethics is act rather than representation. And yet, no matter how much Massey tells us—and himself—that "talk" about ethics is a sterile subject, and that virtue cannot be imitated, the nagging question remains: "What, then, is literature good for?"

Find You the Virtue seeks possible answers by pointing out how ethical concerns provide a context in which desire, image, and what Massey calls "the literary" can intersect. Here, for example, is a representative sample, taken from his discussion of Flaubert's "The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaler":

The whole problem of Flaubert's tale is how the sweetness of a moral can struggle to the surface through the layer of silence that is imposed on the story by the speechless opacity of the stained glass. No image ever speaks for itself. Concepts code themselves spontaneously into images, but images do not factor themselves out into concepts. Energy is required to puncture the membrane between image and language. And in the case of "St. Julian," the moral ("Atone!") is such a cliché that one does not even think of articulating it: it can pass entirely unnoticed.

Massey draws additional illustrations from a wide range of major works: Hamlet, Othello, Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilych," Chekhov's "Ward 6."

Massey is, let me admit it, a difficult writer—partly because the abstract often turns abstruse and partly because his individual sentences, awash with semicolons, pack in more than the eye or head can easily hold. But that said, let me hasten to add that Massey is worth our trouble. He engages significant topics, and even more to the critical point, he brings his entire being to the enterprise:

During periods of depression, I have sometimes had the habit of walking in Buffalo's Delaware Park. A willow tree hangs over the lake. I sometimes stop under the tree, look out through the overhanging branches, and hope that the tree is going to do something for me. On one occasion, when it did, I wrote down a comment about the experience. I repeat it here, with a partial gloss.

"In the version of process philosophy, or Bergsonism, to which I have been committed, the ethical bonds to time and act: some defect of right haunts the pictures of the past. Yet what is love, if not an acceptance of the picture of the past, present made continuous? It lifts the baskets of the willow, and they remain in air; they become then-forevers. Through the surge of vision that moved them, all absence that might ever have been in them is obliterated."

Massey's gloss—which runs several pages—has the superficial look of an extended aside (if not of an irrelevancy), but it is not. Gradually, one begins to see as Massey sees, and to understand how the apparently disparate parts of Find You the Virtue comprise a vision of ethical possibility.

Granted, he is cautious, often skeptical, about easy equations between aesthetic image and human virtue. (After Auschwitz, how can one not be?) But a worst-case scenario and the questions it raises—e.g., "Did the Beethoven works played by the inmates of Auschwitz affect the audience of mass murderers differently from the way in which they affected the musicians?"—lead Massey to conclude:

Even in that extreme case I would be inclined to say No. It seems that we all take pleasure to some degree in the idea of the good when we read, or when we listen to music…. Perhaps virtue is, after all, what everybody lusts after in books …

Even in this postliterate, postaesthetic, and possibly postethical age, we all continue to seek out art, with its unnameable ethical satisfactions, ambiguous as the very status of ethics itself may be.

In many respects, Robert Coles's The Call of Stories is also an extended exercise in self-scrutiny, but one rendered through the voices of Coles's students as they grappled both with the works he assigned (e.g., Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Flannery O'Connor's "The Artificial Nigger," Walker Percy's The Moviegoer) and with their often complicated reactions to them. As The Call of Stories makes clear, Coles learned to listen early—first, from parents who read Middlemarch or War and Peace aloud and gradually infected their children with the same virus for story; later, from the Dr. Ludwig who passed along this piece of invaluable advice to a young Dr. Coles just beginning to feel his way around the psychiatric wards at Massachusetts General Hospital:

"The people who come to see us" [Dr. Ludwig began, after Coles had hidden behind the word psychodynamics once too often] "bring us their stories. They hope they tell them well enough so that we understand the truth of their lives. They hope we know how to interpret their stories correctly. We have to remember that what we hear is their story."

To listen deeply was, for Ludwig, much more important than "getting a fix" on the patient or deciding on a "therapeutic agenda." While these may have value, he preferred the human being to the abstraction, the "story" to reductive formulas that rushed past it.

Still later, Dr. William Carlos Williams (Coles's mentor, both for his ideas about medicine and his ideas about art) put it this way:

"We have to pay the closest attention to what we say. What patients say tells us what to think about what hurts them: and what we say tells us what is happening to us—what we are thinking, and what may be wrong with us." A pause, then another jab at my murky mind: "Their story, yours, mine—it's what we all carry with us on this trip we take, and we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them."

Granted, these comments may not carry the weight of theory that characterizes most contemporary critical discourse, but as Coles's altogether human and humanizing book goes on to demonstrate, there is important wisdom packed into a willingness to take stories seriously—those we read, as well as those our students tell us about them. In this sense, Coles's title is autobiographical: "one keeps learning by teaching fiction or poetry because every reader's response to a writer's call can have its own startling, suggesting power, as my parents tried to convey."

Like Massey, Coles falls naturally into the interrogative mode: "Ought Jude [the obscure] to haunt us in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in this century?" As it turns out, the student who posed the question meant it to be rhetorical, a way of expressing his dissatisfaction with an educational system that asked students to write clever essays on topics such as "Discuss Jude's attitude toward education," but not to tackle tougher ethical questions. The student continued,

"I mean, why not discuss places like Oxford and Harvard? What is our attitude toward education? Hardy took aim at academic snobbery, and it would be great if we were asked to connect what Hardy wrote with what we see now. What's the point of reading Jude the Obscure if you don't stop and ask yourself about the Judes out there beyond the Harvard Yard, who might feel about us the way Jude felt when he came to Christminster?… One way to read a novel like that is to see it as a challenge to your conscience, not just your intellect. Aren't we here to grow a little in that direction—to become self-critical as well as critical?" A long pause, and then he told me: "You don't have to answer that one."

In effect, The Call of Stories is Coles's long-delayed answer. A part of him knew then—and continues to believe now—that colleges are places that "help students learn to perform intellectual exercises." What his student dismisses so casually is both important and valuable. But who would not wish to see more of our students—indeed, more of us—read Jude the Obscure or Great Expectations in such a way that they were "not only nineteenth-century classics but urgent commentaries on twentieth-century life"?

The modest claims that Coles makes for the reading and listening he has done over the past thirty years belie the considerable impact he has had as one of our consummate teachers of literature. As he puts it, summing up: "All in all, not a bad start for someone trying to find a good way to live this life: a person's moral conduct responding to the moral imagination of writers and the moral imperative of fellow human beings in need."

I cannot help but think that the other writers I've discussed here—however different their approaches or respective vocabularies might be—would nod in agreement with Coles. But perhaps more important, I suspect that their stake in the ethics of criticism is more widely shared than even they imagine.