Why Ethical Criticism Can Never Be Simple

Auden's assertion that poetry doesn't make things happen is a tidy conceit for a melancholy afternoon's tea break, but as the prayers smoke from the mosque and the young thousands chant rap, my era will re-examine what is happening. Nor in that circum-audient air can one deny - terrifying, some of it - the power of prose. - Hortense Calisher This essay is one of many recent efforts, by myself and others, to challenge two critical schools popular through much of century: those who think judgments have nothing to do with genuine literary or aesthetic criticism, and those who think that judgments about stories can never be anything more than subjective opinion. My thesis is thus double: criticism is relevant to all literature, no matter how broadly or narrowly we define that controversial term; and such criticism, when done responsibly, can be a genuine form of rational inquiry. It is true that it will never produce results nearly as uncontroversial as deciding whether it rained in New York yesterday, or even whether President Clinton lied. What's more, many of its judgments, such as Plato's exaggerated attacks on Homer, will be rejected by most serious critics. Yet when responsible readers of powerful stories engage in genuine about their value, they can produce results that deserve the tricky label knowledge.(1) The very phrase ethical inquiry is for some thinkers an oxymoron. Ethical indictment of a story? Of course you can have that, as a personal expression. Ethical celebration? All right, if it will please a collection of fellow believers. But inquiry? The word implies the chance of arriving at established, decisive conclusions: knowledge. About ethics, many still claim, there can be no such conclusions - and thus no genuine about them. For some these days, the claim has been strengthened by a flood of aggressive and often carelessly performed denigrations of first-class works on grounds of sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, or classism. Though seldom travelling under moral or terminology, these intrusions of ideological interests have seemed to some a total corruption of the formal or structural standards that dominated criticism in mid-century.(2) Meanwhile, over-confident or moral indictments and calls for censorship seem increasingly fashionable, many of them pursued so irrationally as to provide evidence that genuine may flee whenever questions about ethics enter the room. The responses to those would-be censors are often equally subjective and opinionated, too often divorced from any serious digging into the potential dangers for readers who really to what the story-teller tells. (From here on I use the term listen to cover all serious engagement with stories, whether by readers or viewers or listeners). Many of the defenders against censorship, resting strictly on first amendment grounds, talk as if to engage in or moral criticism is itself an act of censorship: once we step onto the slippery slope - this story is ethically faulty - the censors will buy our words and hurtle us on to the bottom. More challenging efforts to rule out criticism come from those who fear that it will destroy our most precious narrative possession: the aesthetic domain, the world of true an, a world that is not just different from the quotidian world of moral conflict but in effect far superior to it. As Wendy Steiner says in the conclusion to The Scandal of Pleasure, genuine art occupies a different moral space from the world of practical affairs. For her, since an is obviously virtual, not primarily concerned about reality it should not be subject to the kind of moral criticism we offer when everyday behavior in the so-called real world offends us (211). What is striking, however, is that whether or not critics defend or attack criticism, and whether or not ideological critics use terms, nearly everyone concedes that no matter what we do or say about the powers of an, those powers are real. …