Ethical Issues in Twentieth-Century French Fiction: Killing the Other PDF
Preview Ethical Issues in Twentieth-Century French Fiction: Killing the Other
Ethical Issues in Twentieth-Century French Fiction Also by Colin Davis ELIE WIESEUS SECRETIVE TEXTS LEVINAS: An Introduction MICHEL TOURNIER: Philosophy and Fiction Ethical Issues in Twentieth-Century French Fiction Killing the Other Colin Davis Lady Margaret Hall Oxford f£ First pubI i s hell in Great B rilai n 2000 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingsloke, Hampshire RG2 I 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for !his book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-349-40749-1 ISBN 978-0-230-28747-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230287471 First published in the United States of America 2000 by ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division. 175 Fifth Avenue. New York. NY 10010 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Davis, Colin. 1960- Ethical issues in twentielh-century French fiction : killing the other I Colin Davi.s. p. em. lnclude.s bibliographical references and index. l. French fiction-20th century-History and criticism. 2. Ethics in li!erature. I. Title. PQ673038 1999 843'.9109- dc21 '19-27402 CIP © Colin Davis 2000 Softcover reprint of the hardcover lst edition 2000 978-0-333-73371-4 All rights reserved. No reproduction. copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced. copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright. Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. 90 Totten ham Court Road, London WI P OLP. Any perwn who does ~ny unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 19!!8. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 0 I 00 Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction: Ethical Criticism 1 1. Otherness, Altericide 12 2. Hermeneutic and Ethical Encounters: Gadamer and Levinas 31 3. Ethics, Fiction, and the Death of the Other: Sartre and Kant 47 4. Camus, Encounters, Reading 64 5. Didacticism and the Ethics of Failure: Beauvoir 86 6. Humanism and its Others: Sartre, Heidegger, Yourcenar 108 7. Ethical Indifference: Duras 131 8. Readers, Others: Genet 152 Conclusion: Tarrying with the Negative 189 Notes 196 Bibliography 216 Index 225 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgements Some of the material in Chapters 3, 4, 5, 7 and 8 originally ap peared in Sartre Studies International, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Modern Languages Review, Comparative Literature Studies and French Studies, respectively. I am grateful to the editors of those journals for permission to reprint. I would also like to thank those who have commented on earlier drafts or otherwise advised and encouraged me during the preparation of this book, in particular Sarah Kay, Emma Wilson, Elizabeth Fallaize, Patrice Bougon, Claire Gorrara, Christina Ho wells, Ingrid Wassenaar, Nigel Saint and Mireille Rosello. VI1 Introduction: Ethical Criticism We have not quite got over the belief, or the hope, that poetry, as I.A. Richards proclaimed, might be capable of saving us.1 Literature has been decried as an elitist irrelevance surpassed by other, more accessible and more democratic cultural media, or as a site where abjection is given the possibility of sharing appalling desires with a gullible audience; but such views have not yet entirely defeated the resilient faith that something good happens to us when we read, that literature reflects and helps to create our moral sensibil ity, that it teaches us decency and humanity. The following pages present a less sanguine account of the ethics of fiction. In reading, as in all encounters with other people or other cul tures, what is at stake is our ability to experience an occurrence which is not defined in advance, to accept the risk and challenge of an event that does not correspond to any expectations that we might have of it. In terms of the Levinassian ethics which have acquired a central position in recent Continental thinking and which in large part lie behind the analyses of this book, the encounter with otherness is a fundamental ethical moment; the generosity or violence of our response, the degree to which we welcome or reject the proximity of the Other, will determine our standing as moral subjects. There is no way of being certain in any given case that the kind of encounter with the Other which Levinas's work revolves around has actually occurred. As critics of Levinas have pointed out, my ability to recognize the Other as Other already implies that I must have some prior knowledge of it.2 The absolute Other, that which is totally alien to my powers of comprehension, would simply pass unnoticed. By characterizing it as outside my world, I have already defined it by reference to my world and hence as part of it. So the Other which I can encounter is perhaps less other, more a function of myself, than Levinas would like. This book is concerned with encounters with alterity which are thematically inscribed in a vari ety of theoretical and fictional texts, which are staged in the act of reading, but which may also be missed or rejected, repudiated in acts of incomprehension or violence. I use the term altericide, the murder of the Other, to describe the possibility for violence inherent 1 C. Davis, Ethical Issues in Twentieth-Century French Fiction © Colin Davis 2000 2 Ethical Issues in French Fiction in the fraught relations between selves and others, texts and readers. This book does not take for granted one of the most common pre mises uniting what has become known as ethical criticism, namely the often unquestioned assumption that the encounter with the Other of literature is both possible and enriching. As I shall sug gest in the rest of this Introduction, ethical criticism - for all its diversity - has generally been united and restricted by its adher ence to a rather limited set of values and critical protocols.3 At the beginning of The Company We Keep (1988) Wayne Booth describes how ethical criticism has fallen on hard times: although it is nearly universally practised, it has become theoretically sus pect (19). Ethical criticism has been confined to the closet. Booth's claim now seems outdated; his own book is a seminal text in the establishment of ethical criticism as one of the dominant strands of modern critical practice. To some extent, ethics has replaced militant politics as one of the mantras of the literary critic. More over, the interest of literary critics in ethics has been matched by the interest of some moral philosophers in literature. Alongside the substantial list of critical and theoretical works concerned with ethics that have been produced by members of literature departments, texts such as Martha Nussbaum's Love's Knowledge (1990), Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) and Colin McGinn's Ethics, Evil, and Fiction (1997) have insisted on the ethical interest of fiction. These latter authors join their literary colleagues in insisting that fiction extends the range of moral experience and ethical reflection: Our experience is, without fiction, too confined and too paro chial. Literature extends it, making us reflect and feel about what might otherwise be too distant for feeling. (Nussbaum, 47) Fiction like that of Dickens, Olive Schreiner, or Richard Wright gives us the details about kinds of suffering being endured by people to whom we had previously not attended. Fiction like that of Choderlos de Laclos, Henry James, or Nabokov gives us the details about what sorts of cruelty we ourselves are capable of, and thereby lets us redescribe ourselves. That is why the novel, the movie and the TV program have, gradually but steadily, replaced the sermon and the treatise as the principal vehicles of moral change and progress. (Rorty, xvi)
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