Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Beyond of Language , livre ebook

SUNY series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature

Charles Shepherdson, editor

Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Beyond of Language
Robert Hughes

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hughes, Robert, 1968–
   Ethics, aesthetics, and the beyond of language / Robert Hughes.
         p. cm.
   Includes bibliographical references and index.
   ISBN 978-1-4384-3193-2 (alk. paper)
   1. American fiction—18th century—History and criticism. 2. American fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 3. Ethics in literature. 4. Aesthetics in literature. 5. Psychology and literature. I. Title.
   PS374.E86H84 2010
   813.001—dc22                                                                                                      2009051690
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

List of Illustrations Cover: Gustave Moreau (1826–1898), Orpheus , Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France. Photo credit: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY Illustration 1: Portrait of a young woman, purportedly Beatrice Cenci, artist unknown. Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Roma Illustration 2: Vincent van Gogh, Shoes [F255]. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation) Illustration 3: Iannis Xenakis, first page from the score of Nomos Alpha. Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Limited, 1967.

Acknowledgments
Cover image: Gustave Moreau (1826–1898), Orpheus , Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France. Photo credit: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.
A shorter, earlier version of chapter one was published under the same title in Arizona Quarterly 61, no. 3 (Fall 2005).
The image of the portrait associated with Beatrice Cenci, in chapter 2 , has been granted courtesy of the Archivio Fotografico Soprintendenza Speciale per il Patrimonio Storico Artistico e Etnoantropologico e per il Polo Museale della città di Roma. Photo credit: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, NY.
The image of Vincent van Gogh's Shoes , in chapter 4 , has been granted courtesy of the Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation).
The image from Iannis Xenakis' score for Nomos Alpha , in chapter 5 , is reprinted by permission of Boosey & Hawkes, Inc. © Copyright 1967 by Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Limited.
A shorter, earlier version of chapter 7 was published under the same title in Postmodern Culture 17, no. 3 (May 2007).
Introduction

Opening Questions: Ethics, Literature, and the Beyond of Language
Since at least the time of the classical Roman poet, Horace, it has been a commonplace of how we speak about literature to say that it must not only delight and give pleasure—it must also instruct and be useful ( Ars Poetica , lines 333–34, 343–44). True, we do not ordinarily expect a poem to teach us how to make a couch or train a horse, but when children are required to read literature in school, perhaps more than anything else we expect it to educate their moral sensibilities. Ubiquitous as the Horatian platitude remains, it has hardly gone uncontested in recent centuries—even among critics and writers seeking merely to refine its scope. Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example, who so often proposed an explicit moral to his tales, nevertheless did not flatter himself that such apothegms, or the romances that support them, operate with anything like direct influence. As he puts it in the preface to The House of the Seven Gables :
When romances do really teach anything, or produce any effective operation, it is usually through a far more subtile process than the ostensible one. The Author has considered it hardly worth his while, therefore, relentlessly to impale the story with its moral … — … as by sticking a pin through a butterfly—thus at once depriving it of life, and causing it to stiffen in an ungainly and unnatural attitude. (352)
Thus, Hawthorne suggests—and perhaps the old Roman would agree with him 1 —that the living ethical force of a work of literature, the good that it may effect, is reducible neither to the content of any didactic advice it may offer, nor even to its moral theme. Indeed, to insist relentlessly upon a direct exposition of the moral is to do violence to both the aesthetic and the ethical potential operative in the work, since this potential derives from some indirect, “far more subtile” process amenable to beauty, pleasure, and life.
Such indirection seems counterintuitive in many respects, not least of which is our everyday notion of language. In the ordinary consideration of the matter, language is a tool. One has a thought, perhaps a moral injunction, and wishes to make it someone else's thought too, so one speaks, or writes, and the thought is thereby carried on the wings of language from one's own mind to that of the other. And yet, upon further reflection, most people will also recognize that language can reach beyond its function as a tool for the communication of ideas. In language, writes Johann Gottfried Herder, the great eighteenth-century critic and philosopher,
[a] breath of our mouth becomes the portrait of the world, the type of our thoughts and feelings in the other's soul. On a bit of moving air depends everything human that men on earth have ever thought, willed, done, and ever will do; for we would all still be roaming the forests if this divine breath had not blown around us, and did not hover on our lips like a magic tome. 2
Language is more than just the first, most fundamental technology and does more than just carry ideas from one head to another. It is also, as Herder suggests, the foundational fact of our humanity. In the most thoroughgoing way, language structures our thought, guides our perception, and gives the very raw material of our dreams and imaginings. Even beyond its celebrated power for representation, language reaches into our souls, enlivens the world and the things around us, and structures the most basic relationship between ourselves and the other. It is the most essential work of literature—as the present book will argue—to renew our sense for this dimension of language beyond representation. But if this is so, how then are we to understand the common intuitive sense, recognized from Horace to Hawthorne, that literature also bears upon the ethical? What does this insight imply for an ethics beyond representation and representational thought? How would we understand an ethics in these terms? And how, finally, are we to think about the relationships among literature, ethics, and this “beyond of language”?
So here, on the terrain of this “beyond” of language, the present study addresses itself to the intersection of two problems: the problem of literature and the problem of ethics. The problem of literature regards the question of what literature is—for present purposes, this regards especially the question of how literature works to engage the reader's interest and passion, what kind of work it performs upon the reader, and how it manages to afflict the reader with the urgent sense that something in the text is calling for a response. The problem of ethics regards the question of whether anything even remains of ethics after one concedes the point that virtually everything one may consciously think perhaps falls more properly under the heading of politics —that is, under the historically contingent and the ideologically freighted. At the intersection of these two problems, then, one finds the two more precise questions of this book: how might one think of a properly ethical dimension to literature, and how might one think of an aesthetic dimension to ethics. These key questions are posed in tandem by the core literary texts of the present work, three works of Romantic American fiction: Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland (1798), Washington Irving's “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820), and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun (1860).
Each of these texts, as we shall see, strikes a complex relation between the ethical and the literary, a productive tension between an intellectual effort to describe or to present the ethical and the necessarily indirect, aesthetic workings of literary fiction. In the postscript to “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” for example, the text begs the question of the moral of the preceding tale, but then seems to assert that no reasonable moral may be derived from the remarkable legend. In Wieland , the prefatory advertisement claims as the novel's purpose the illustration of the moral constitution of man, but then the novel proceeds to destabilize both an ethics of faith as well as an ethics of reason. In The Marble Faun , the preface announces the novel's ambition to evolve a thoughtful moral, but then weaves a text of the most fragile uncertainty and profoundest perplexity, as if to suspend its readers in relation to a void of thought, a place where ethics confronts some impossibility of thinking.
The present study reads these works of early American fiction and takes them in earnest both for their moral ambitions and for the impossibility they seem to announce in the way one can think about ethics. What this book finds is that each text locates an ethical demand precisely at the place where language and understanding fail and reason arrives at an impasse. Literature, as we shall see, highlights and imposes a psychological, existenti