To Read and to Live (Part 4)

Continued...see Parts 1, 2 and 3.

In discussing ethical criticism, we might begin with Wayne Booth and his book, The Company We Keep, an excellent starting point for any serious reflection on this subject. It provides quite a storehouse of information about this often neglected exploration in literature. In fact, the most important thing to note about it is precisely that, that it is a storehouse. You see, The Company We Keep is a big book, over five hundred pages. Its chapters vary widely in theme and scope. There is a general defense of ethical criticism, an excursion on myths, and reflections on several controversial authors.

In addition, the book contains a virtual anthology of quotations about the ethical implications of reading and writing, along with a positively enormous bibliography (in fact, by my count, the quotations and bibliographical entries combined take up a full ninety-six pages in the book). Booth seems to be attempting to provide as full a representation as he can muster of what he calls "a banned discipline," ethical criticism. The literature of this discipline is so scattered and neglected that Booth has taken it upon himself to gather up the scatterings and bind them together, so that the lengthy and impressive history of ethical reflection about literature can be seen in proper perspective. The apparent sloppiness and patched-together look of the book masks what is in fact its fundamental purpose: not to sustain a single argument, but to give new life to an often neglected, yet valuable way of thinking about literature.

This is not to say that Booth does not have arguments to make, and important ones, too. One position he explores, for example, to provide a way around the impasse of sheer power versus sheer piety is an argument for the notion of books as friends. Now, one of the things especially admirable about Wayne Booth is his willingness to present this notion quite seriously--though he is no doubt perfectly aware that many of us will immediately recall first-grade teachers admonishing us in gentle tones: "Books are our friends, so let's take good care of them." Well, Booth seems to be saying, books--many books, anyway--are our friends. But this is no sentimental notion of friendship: it is, to the contrary, grounded in Aristotle's complex and sophisticated analysis of the motives for and consequences of friendship; it is constantly aware of the many varieties of friendship and our ways of assessing good and bad friends; and it acknowledges that friendships may develop, or end, unexpectedly.

Booth's notion of books as friends is important for our concerns here because, as I suggested earlier, it teaches us that we don't have to think of our reading solely as a power struggle for control of our minds. His model of reading and criticism is, in a word, dialogical, because each party brings something to the meeting: statements and counterstatements are made, proposals are examined and discussed, gifts are offered and accepted or declined. And just such a dialogical approach is necessary if genuine and meaningful ethical reflection is to arise from our reading experiences.

As the Russian genius Mikhail Bakhtin has pointed out, literature particularly invites such dialogical response, and therefore literature particularly invites ethical reflection. Booth's book tells us how we might bring ethical reflection into the classrooms in which we study, or the papers in which we write about, literature. But we can turn that idea around, and in the process turn the argument of this essay around: Bakhtin's ideas suggest that we also need to bring literature into whatever ethical thinking we already do.

There are many little stories brought up in college Ethics courses, intended to illustrate ethical conflict. In my experience, the professor would break us up into small groups in which we would argue about how to solve the problem at hand. The sorts of scenarios he used are well-known: there are twelve people in a lifeboat but only enough food and water for six, so how do we decide who should live and who should be tossed overboard? Do we save the welfare mother of five or the neurosurgeon? I can't say I particularly enjoyed arguing about these scenarios (I hated it), but on the other hand, I can understand the excitement in the offer to play God, to separate Those Who Shall Live from Those Who Shall Die?.

And it is, perhaps, for that reason, that it never occurs to many students to ask why these scenarios so little resemble the ethical decisions made in real life. How often is any of us faced with an ethical choice in which we know (or even think we know) all the relevant information necessary to make a decision? In real life our choices are much more complex: our information is neither complete nor certain, and our understanding of the potential consequences of our decisions tends to be pretty shaky. For these reasons, Bakhtin has argued, it is in literature, and particularly the great novels, that the most accurate and useful accounts of our moral lives may be found. In the words of Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, "If ethics were an object of knowledge, then philosophy would be the best moral education. But ethics is a matter not of knowledge, but of wisdom. And wisdom, Bakhtin believed, is not systematizable." The great novels are an education in just such wisdom.

To be continued with the help of George Eliot's Middlemarch.