Wednesday, April 05, 2006

I'm writing elsewhere

about Joyce Carol Oates & so haven't been blogging as I read (it's like biting my tongue--amazing how quickly I got used to writing immediately about what I read, and what self-restraint it requires not to!), but I came across this passage last night that certainly has nothing to do with what I will say there & I can't resist giving it here.

It touches on that question about bad books and bad reviews that I've been thinking about recently, and it's from the introduction to Uncensored: Views & (Re)views, an excellent collection of Oates's recent criticism:

My governing principle as a critic is to call attention solely to books and writers that merit such attention, and to avoid whenever possible reviewing books "negatively" except in those instances in which the "negative" is countered by an admiring consideration of earlier books by the same author. (In assembling this collection, I immediately rejected all "negative" reviews on moral grounds as unworthy of reprint, as, perhaps, they were unworthy of being written. How small-minded we seem to ourselves in retrospect, chiding others! Much better to have passed over such disappointments in silence. Then, as the pile of rejected pieces grew, I began to feel that I was too-primly censoring myself, and eliminating much that might be of interest despite its critical tone. Of the numerous "censored" reviews I retrieved only three, of short story collections by Patricia Highsmith and Richard Yates and a novella by Anita Brookner, all of which have been sufficiently praised elsewhere, in any case.) As our relations with others are essentially ethical encounters, so our relations with books, and with those individuals who have written them, are ethical encounters. Obviously, a critic who "likes everything" is a very bland personality hardly to be trusted, but there might be a respectable category of critic who, disliking something, refrains from making public comment on it. In America, do we need to caution anyone against buying a book?

There you have it. Isn't that an amazing passage?

Joyce Carol Oates is a very special writer to me, I have been reading her for a long time and her writing matters to me in a way that lots of the books I read & like don't. (Also I had a remarkably heartening personal encounter with her at a moment when I was in absolute despair about whether my first novel was ever going to be published, and in the most generous possible way she managed to persuade me that [a] my novel was publishable and [b] sometimes you have to move on from a project. I wish I had the exact words here, it was a most lovely little typed postcard that I put somewhere so safe that I will probably never be able to find it again. Though I feel I have transgressed, even mentioning it, as there is a stringent and thought-provoking little essay at the end of this collection called "Private Writings, Public Betrayals" about what happens when people make public--or even sell, as an act of revenge--the letters of famous writers. But surely this is different....)

All right, I'm just going to quote again my favorite sentence from that passage above, because it also seems to me a good reminder for bloggers in particular: "As our relations with others are essentially ethical encounters, so our relations with books, and with those individuals who have written them, are ethical encounters." Good stuff, eh?

9 comments:

  1. I wonder how Oates would define an 'ethical encounter' with books. For many readers I doubt this is the case; even for deeply thoughtful readers this may only be a limited aspect of the reading experience. However, perhaps one can have ethical encounters with parts of oneself.

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  2. Derek Attridge's _The Singularity of Literature_ is particularly good, I think, on the question of the ethics of encountering a text.

    -- Rachel Hollander

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  3. Haven't read that one, but I am a fan of Attridge in general, will make sure to check it out. I don't feel that I have an ethical encounter with _all_ of the books I read--perhaps this is the difference between light and non-light reading--but in some cases it is exactly the thing that happens. You do, surely, have an ethical encounter with an aspect of the author's mind, even if the book can't respond back to you (shades of Plato...).

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  4. I think you're going to need to define your understanding of 'ethical encounter' for me. I don't find it at all self-evident. (Perhaps it has to do with the kind of reader I am.)

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  5. I feel funny talking about these serious things! But surely (though often it's mainly cultural conservatives who actually _say_ this) we do read lots of works of literature out of a concern to discover the shape and nature of our own ethical system (how to live, broadly conceived, morally etc.--J. M. Coetzee is the major contemporary novelist who I feel is most explicitly concerned with this, it is often thematized in his novels in various ways--and the French theorist Levinas is a name that also often comes up in these conversations although I must say I have never read him). But perhaps it's easier to think of ethos rather than ethics for the root (I've pasted in the Britannica definition below):

    (Greek: “disposition” or “character”)

    "in rhetoric, the character or emotions of a speaker or writer that are expressed in the attempt to persuade an audience. It is distinguished from pathos, which is the emotion the speaker or writer hopes to induce in the audience. The two words were distinguished in a broader sense by ancient Classical authors, who used pathos when referring to the violent emotions and ethos to mean the calmer ones. Ethos was the natural disposition or moral character, an abiding quality, and pathos a temporary and often violent emotional state. For Renaissance writers the distinction was a different one: ethos described character and pathos an emotional appeal."

    To put it bluntly, then (probably more bluntly than Oates meant it), when I engage with you it calls upon both my 'ethos' or character and my 'ethics' or idea of how to live morally & our encounter could in theory be 'rated'--'ethical' both describes the 'quality' (so to speak) of the interaction and its moral depth or texture, so as to say that I might fail in an ethical encounter just as I might succeed in it (by deepening my understanding of the other, for instance, or by understanding something new about how I relate to the society I live in).

    I am not sure whether this clarifies things at all, but I thought I would try....

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  6. Well, if the conversation is continuing I'll jump back in (I'm a new-ish English prof. myself and, in the interest of full disclosure, a former student of Derek Attridge). I work on Levinas and Derrida and the novel, and I think Jenny's post was on target. All I would add is that I think that while some texts can be "consumed" or integrated into (or rejected from) one's already established sense of self, other texts seem to demand that one adjust or reconsider one's sense of self in response to that text. It is this sense of being challenged or disturbed by a reading that I think of as ethical, and it is one of the possiblities I try to keep open when I teach.

    -- Rachel Hollander

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  7. Thank you, Rachel, that is excellent; you've put your finger on exactly that sense of the unsettling of the self, the way that certain books ask us to readjust or reorient ourselves as part of an ethical call. I'm curious what novels you work on--it's a great topic, I will look forward to reading some of your stuff--I think of course of people like Austen and Tolstoy and Henry James, don't know if that's at all your line of thought....

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  8. I'm going out on a limb here, I imagine, and really don't like to make such generalisations, but I feel most readers react emotionally to a text, often for a relatively short time, and with in fact very little adjustment or reconsideration of self. The whole question of self, and how and to what extent it changes, is in itself of the most central concerns in literature, but I'm not sure that makes it precisely an ethical issue, or at least primarily one. That it can be, I don't doubt. In a sense, I question whether deepening one's understanding of another person, fictional or otherwise, is in itself an ethical endeavour, though it may be a precondition for just such an endeavour.

    Are you equating, roughly speaking, the 'ethical' with the 'true' in the truth/beauty formula? In my own reading I tend to have more of aesthetic than an ethical encounter with text.

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  9. I would agree that this kind of deep or conscious ethical experience doesn't happen most of the time in reading. But I'm uncomfortable with separating the ethical from the aesthetic: the ethical encounter I'm talking about is more likely to happen in literature precisely because of the aesthetic qualities that would distinguish it from other kinds of writing. I guess I would define just about all human interaction as having some ethical element.

    And in answer to your question, Jenny, the book project (I'm learning to stop calling it the dissertation...) starts with George Eliot and runs through Hardy, Conrad, and Woolf. I have an article out on Daniel Deronda that would give a pretty good sense of what I'm up to.

    --Rachel

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