Recognition and Ethics in World Literature: Religion, Violence, and the Human

ibidem Press, Stuttgart

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction Ethics, the World, and the Postcolonial: The Case of Kazuo Ishiguro

I

II

III

IV

Chapter One Anagnorisis and the Clash of Values

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II

III

Chapter Two Religion and the Ethics of Remembrance

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II

III

IV

V

Chapter Three The Failure of Recognition

I

II

III

IV

Chapter Four The Beauty of the Mortal Human

I

II

III

Conclusion Elizabeth Costello

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

There are a number of people without whom this work would not have materialised, and whom I would like thank.

This book is the culmination of my graduate research at the University of Oxford (DPhil) and the University of the Western Cape (MA). As such, I remain grateful for the critical input of my research supervisors into those original projects, namely Elleke Boehmer and Cheryl-Ann Michael. I would also like to thank the editors of the Studies in World Literature series, Janet Wilson and Chris Ringrose, for their patience with me in preparing this manuscript and for their valuable comments and insight.

There have been numerous colleagues, friends and family members who have supported me along the way and who have contributed through discussion, debate, and commenting on various drafts. In particular, I would like to thank the academic communities of the University of Oxford, the University of the Western Cape (UWC), and the Centre for Humanities Research, UWC. More specifically, I would like to name Steve Whitla, Scott Teal, Nisha Manocha, Charlotta Salmi, Stephanie Yorke, Ankhi Mukherjee, Deborah Rosario, Neal McEwan, and Maurits van Bever Donker. I am ever grateful to my wife, Machilu, for her continual encouragement and unswerving support. Needless to say, any errors remain my own.

This project draws on the research that was enabled by funding from the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission and the Mandela Rhodes Foundation, without whose generosity it would not have been possible.

Introduction

Ethics, the World, and the Postcolonial:

The Case of Kazuo Ishiguro

Nobody would deny (though some of course do) that some works for some readers on some occasions do provide a precious melting of categories that would otherwise freeze the reader's soul. But are we to believe that every reader in every epoch most needs one kind of shock, or even a shock at all, and that there are no other ethical effects that for some readers in some circumstances might be more valuable?

(Booth 1988, 68)

I

The question of ethics in literature is not new. Wayne Booth, in his work The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (1988), comments that ethical criticism is a human practice that refuses to die, in spite of centuries of assault from theory (6). Indeed, ethical concerns in and about literature (in its various forms) have run from Plato's banishment of poets from his ideal republic, through Sir Phillip Sidney's 16th-century An Apology for Poetry¸ to today's postcolonial, feminist and queer critics, to name only a few. The current prominence of ethics in literary criticism is, then, a return to a concern that has, in the past, been absent from world literature. Focused as world literature tends to be on universalizable aesthetic appreciations, more localised ethical commitments have generally failed to register. It is in postcolonial studies—many of whose texts could also be considered world literature—that contemporary concerns with the ethics of literature have been most robustly investigated. To approach the ethics of world literature is simultaneously to invoke the general (and ancient) question of ethics in literature, and the postcolonial insistence on the influence of the legacy of colonialism on the ethical commitments of texts.

Anne Morgan's recent book, Reading the World: Confessions of a Literary Explorer (2015), is illustrative. In it, Morgan relates the reflections and challenges that framed her year of reading a book from every country in the world. Translating her experience into the imagery of travel and exploration, she outlines several difficulties, from ideas of authenticity that result from framing her enterprise in nationalistic terms (what she dubs, in her chapter titles, Identifying Landmarks) to the need for and limitations of the publishing industry (two features that she likens to following trade winds and departing from the beaten track, respectively). In discussing the more specific challenges confronted in beginning her project—namely the immense quantity of literature in the world and the opacity of other cultures and unfamiliar languages—Morgan criticises the advice of David Damrosch, a leading theorist of world literature, to embed individual readings of texts in cultural knowledge through preliminary research. She comments,

Damrosch overlooks somewhat […] that, for many people, one of the major incentives for reading books from other cultures is discovery itself. Rightly or wrongly, we tend to regard literary works as windows on other worlds. [….] All this earnestness [of first researching the book's culture] takes the fun out of the idea of reading such works. (17–18)

Eschewing contextualizing research, on the grounds that it stamps out the desire with which one picked up the book in the first place, she, ironically, argues for Damrosch's understanding of world literature as multiple windows on the world or worlds beyond our own place and time—one part of Damrosch's definition of world literature (Damrosch 2003, 15, 281). Morgan's book is interesting, though, not only because a popular text on the challenges of reading works from around the world is indicative of the increasing popularity of world literature, both academically and in mainstream culture, but also because her chosen metaphor of travel and exploration raises the spectre of colonialism and thus evokes the tension between world and postcolonial literature within which this book is positioned.

There is first, somewhat obliquely, the ghost of empire past in the well-documented connections between exploration and travel (writing) and the colonial project (Hulme 1990; Pratt 2008; Boehmer 2005). A more pertinent problem, however, is the way in which the exploration of foreign cultures and lands, particularly its proximity to discourses of tourism, feeds into present imperial structures, namely through the figure of the exotic. Graham Huggan (2001) has explored in detail the tensions inherent in the field of postcolonial studies between

contending regimes of value: one regime—postcolonialism—that posits itself as anti-colonial, and that works towards the dissolution of imperial epistemologies and institutional structures; and another—postcoloniality—that is more closely tied to the global market, and that capitalises both on the widespread circulation of ideas about cultural otherness and on the worldwide trafficking of culturally 'othered' artefacts and goods. (68)

The contemporary circulation of literature from other cultures runs the risk of exoticization: the domesticating process through which commodities are taken from the margins and reabsorbed into mainstream culture (Huggan 2001, 59). While Huggan's focus here is on postcolonial literature, this challenge is faced more sharply by world literature. A crucial part of Huggan's analysis focuses on the use by postcolonial writers of strategic exoticism in order to critique (continuing) imperial structures and discourses (75). Thus, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, despite containing anthropological elements—and frequently being read as ethnography—destabilises such readings through its use of irony and postcolonial parody-reversal in its closing movements (92). This is a form of critique that, as Robert Young (2014) remarks, is concerned with the impact of the text, through its various modes of resistance, on realities beyond itself (217), but it is this critical aspect of postcolonialism (in both writing and criticism) that risks being elided under the designation of world literature. As Elleke Boehmer (2014) has remarked, world literature is often taken as synonymous with, or as a replacement for, the postcolonial (299), a move that could, she suggests, be in part due to a contemporary discomfort with the latter’s perpetually critical stance (306); world literature is considered to be more neutral. It is seen as focused on the literary rather than the political or ethical (Albrecht 2013; Young 2014), with the result that the critical concerns of postcolonialism, which are maintained in tension with the commercial appropriation of the exotic, can be passed over (Boehmer 2014, 306). It is for this reason, in part, that Huggan has more recently described world literature as "too much a symptom of the often profoundly anti-democratic and neo-imperialist tendencies within globalization" (2011, 491, emphasis in original).

The tension between the world and the postcolonial that Morgan's imagery of exploration evokes is salient for the study of ethics in world literature since postcolonialism is particularly distinctive in its ethical commitments. Robert Young comments that while world literature makes a claim to universality through its conception of literature of such quality and insight that it transcends its local context to establish itself as universal, shared by all cultures (2014, 213–214), postcolonial literature, with its focus on the local and particular, nevertheless achieves a certain universality through its relation to the ethical (218).[1] The ethical (or what could be termed the ethico-political, since its concerns are also political in its broadest sense [218]) constitutes one of the main focal points of debates between world and postcolonial literature. We have already seen something of the disquiet of postcolonialism at its gradual supplantation by world literature due to the erasure of the ethical. It is important to note, however, that this ethical concern in postcolonial studies has generally been dominated by singularity, or the relation with alterity (or otherness).

We can observe this in a dialogue between David Damrosch and Gayatri Spivak on world literature (Damrosch and Spivak 2011). Damrosch's argument pivots around concerns about translation and reading works in their original languages, the necessity for collaborative work in the study of world literature, and the importance of theoretical pluralism, all seen as attempts to move beyond the situation of American specialists presuming to put together world anthologies, and […] the publishing conglomerates trying to Americanize the world. Damrosch, however, relativises this situation by arguing that such anthologies were never meant for the global market, since, in publishing, the global rights [cost] twice as much as the North American rights. Consequently, capitalism itself has safeguarded the rest of the world from the invasion of American world literature anthologies (457). He is thus able to relocate this apparent global inequality onto the relationships between ivy league and other universities within the United States, which he describes as neocolonial (460), and diagnoses these problems, not as global, but as symptomatic of both comparative and world literature courses in the United States, when either is done badly (464).

Spivak, by contrast, is not concerned with how to situate the peaks of the literary production of the world on a level playing field, which is Damrosch's focus, but instead to ask what makes literary cases singular. The singular is always universalizable, never the universal. The site of readings is to make the singular visible in its ability (Damrosch and Spivak 2011, 466). What Spivak resists here in her discussion with Damrosch is incorporating works of literature into a universal or world system where the text's singularity is consequently lost. As Lorna Burns (2015) glosses it: what is at stake in Spivak's intervention in world literature and what marks her difference is alterity and ethics. Hers is a reframing of world literature that retains the critical gains made by postcolonial theory (243). Spivak thus, in concurrence with her more general commitment to ethical singularity,[2] goes on to comment that the ethical reflex is to go toward the other, and literature doesn't teach you that, but literature allows you to train for that (Damrosch and Spivak 2011, 482).

This dialogue between Damrosch and Spivak is illustrative of the tension between world literature and postcolonial literature centred on an ethics of singularity. Such a privileging of alterity has itself been a focus of criticism of postcolonialism, both internally and externally. Monika Albrecht (2013), for instance, argues that some postcolonialism neglects the more literary aspects of texts, producing predictable criticism that is remarkably superficial in its literary analyses (52), as well as, in the words of Neil Lazarus, a fetishizing [of] difference under the rubric of incommensurability (quoted in Albrecht 2013, 53). I will consider the question of an ethics of singularity in literary criticism in more detail below but the approach to ethical criticism that I develop in this book is put to work within this tension between world and postcolonial literature. Insisting on the ethical in world literature, and the importance of the debates that surround it within postcolonialism, I agree, to an extent, with arguments such as Albrecht's. I therefore contend for a widening of the scope of the ethical that maintains the concerns of postcolonialism, but which simultaneously focuses on narrative form—specifically the functioning of recognition. To fill in the details of what exactly I mean by this will take us on a detour through the details of postcolonial ethics and the particular problems I see with an ethics of singularity (beyond simply claiming, as Albrecht does, a repetitiveness of conclusions), as well as a subsequent discussion of the approach I will develop over the course of this book. Finally, I will consider Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. A prominent text in both world and postcolonial literature, which has also been the focus of analysis from divergent perspectives on ethical criticism, it is primed to illustrate more concretely the ethical approach to world literature that I develop.

II

Since what is meant by the term postcolonial has been the focus of much debate, it is worth stating that its use in this book follows Stuart Hall (1996), who argues that the concept of the postcolonial—deployed at a high level of abstraction—helps to mark the (uneven) historical and epistemological transition from the age of Empires to the post-independence or post-decolonisation moment (246); or, in Peter Hulme's words, the process of disengagement from the whole colonial syndrome (quoted in Hall 1996, 246). Postcolonial literature is, therefore, understood as writing which critically or subversively scrutinizes the colonial relationship. It is writing that sets out in some way or another to resist colonialist perspectives [and] to undercut thematically and formally the discourses which supported colonization (Boehmer 2005, 3). While such a definition has some difficulty accounting for works which might be considered postcolonial—since coming from a former colony—but are not necessarily critical of the legacies of empire (such as the work of V.S. Naipaul), what this indicates is the fact that postcolonial literature as a field is never neutral (Young 2014, 219). The ethical concerns of postcolonial literatures are those predominantly aimed at a critique of imperialism and its legacies.

While postcolonialism can be understood to be distinctive in its ethical commitment, the presence of ethical concerns within postcolonial (or, indeed, world) literature should not be surprising. As already noted, postcolonial literature, as literature, participates in a long tradition in which the assertion of ethical positions is prominent. In one respect this is due to the fact that novels are inescapably ethically committed—particularly realist novels, which in presenting descriptions of reality represent the ethical side of life, even if these representations are sometimes reductively simple or crass (Phelan 1996). As Abraham Yehoshua (2005) observes, whether we like it or not, every artistic work that deals with human relations has in it a moral aspect because all human relationships may be evaluated according to moral categories (18). However even the most abstract, nonconventional or unrealistic work of literature implies an ethics: at the very least it implies that it is worth taking the time to engage with it rather than doing something else. As Wayne Booth (1988) argues,

Each work of art or artifice, even the simplest wordless melody, determines to some degree how at least this one moment will be lived. The quality of life in the moment of our listening is not what it would have been if we had not listened. We can even say that the proffered work shows us how our moments should be lived. If the maker of the art work did not believe that simply experiencing it constitutes a superior form of life, why was the work created and presented to us in the first place? (17)

This ethical stance of all literature, at once implicit and explicit, is as it were the baseline of ethical criticism and is developed in different ways by various critics.

Within the form of narrative prose that is the purview of this study, however, postcolonial literature finds itself in a double bind: the criticism of colonialism is undertaken through the use of European and Enlightenment ideals and forms. Indeed, the spread of the novel form around the globe, disseminated as part of educational syllabi, was in large part due to its use in the cause of imperialism. As Appiah (1992) notes,

When the colonialists attempted to tame the threatening cultural otherness of the African […] the instrument of pedagogy was their most formidable weapon. [….] Colonial education, in short, produced a generation immersed in the literature of the colonisers, a literature which often reflected and transmitted the imperialist vision. (87)

The literature of Europe was used by colonialists to exercise control over the colonised.[3] And this legacy is still strong, as can be seen by the continued use of the novel form—often written in the languages of Europe—a connection that is strengthened through this tradition forming an object of critique. Yet, during the anti-colonial struggles and after the end of direct colonial rule, European languages and European disciplines have been 'turned', like double agents, from projects of the metropole to the intellectual work of postcolonial cultural life (Appiah 1992, 88). As Boehmer puts it, since literature contributed to the making, definition and clarification of colonialist ideas (2005, 5), there has been a corresponding intervention by colonized people in the fiction and myths that presumed to describe them (6). It is thus through its deployment in the service of what we might call postcolonial ends that postcolonial literature is marked as such; and it is for this reason, despite this double bind, that what can be described as distinctive about the postcolonial novel's ethics is its concern with critiquing and undermining the legacies and epistemologies of colonialism.

This gesture of using colonial forms to critique colonialism is an aporia that is poignantly felt in philosophy, particularly in ethics. In considering the ethical impetus of postcolonial criticism and literature, it becomes clear that universal Enlightenment ideals are at work. As Chakrabarty (2000) observes,

Modern social critiques of caste, oppressions of women, the lack of rights for labouring and subaltern castes in India, and so on—and, in fact, the very critique of colonialism itself—are unthinkable except as a legacy, partially, of how Enlightenment Europe was appropriated in the subcontinent. (4)

The use of Enlightenment concepts in the criticism of colonialism and its legacies is ubiquitous in postcolonial criticism. Part of the difficulty with these concepts is their pretence to universalism: the problem is not that Europe has these ideals, but that they were, and are, taken as applicable to all different cultures. As such, the need is for true universals, not European values masquerading as universal (Appiah 1992). Nevertheless, the need for universals remains, and there have been important arguments made by theorists, such as Peter Hallward (2001, 177–178), that if we abandon them, it is only a matter of time before right becomes equated with might. Together with the need to work towards universals, however, there is also a simultaneous obligation to focus upon, and do justice to, the particular and idiosyncratic, a demand that is inseparable from postcolonialism (Hallward 2001; Shohat 1992). As will become clear, these two central tensions—the interplay between the universal and the particular, and the simultaneous use and critique of Enlightenment concepts, what David Scott (2004) calls the paradox of colonial Enlightenment (131)—are integral to an ethics that addresses postcolonial concerns without over emphasizing singularity.[4]

In the Levinasian/Derridean understanding of ethics, from where the ethics of singularity is often sourced, the ethical is distinct from the political and the moral: the latter two have to do with general questions of conduct in the political and the social realm, what Levinas calls the realm of the third; the former has to do with an unregulated, undetermined openness and address to the singular other. As Derrida phrases it in an interview, when I try to think the most rigorous relation with the other I must be ready to give up the hope for a return to salvation, the hope for resurrection, or even reconciliation (Kearney 2004, 3). Any expectation of what the other should be like (just, kind, generous, etc.) or what the relation to the other should result in (reconciliation, salvation, etc.) begins to determine the relation, which is to slip out of the ethical, characterised by a radically open and undetermined hospitality, and into the political and juridical. For Levinas and Derrida, this unspecified relation to the other has the character of infinite responsibility and is the source of (though not the recipe for) law and morality/ethics as these are commonly understood.

One of the most systematic developments of such an ethics of singularity within literary criticism is perhaps that by Adam Newton (1995) in his Narrative Ethics. For Newton, "narrative ethics implies simply narrative as ethics: the ethical consequences of narrating story and fictionalizing person, and the reciprocal claims binding teller, listener, witness, and reader in that process (11). For Levinas (1998), the ethical and the realm of the third can be respectively designated by the saying and the said, both of which are simultaneously present in our relation to the other in language. Saying is the pure relation between the self and other, the moment of encounter that is the relation to the revelation of the face, that is, the revelation of the other as resisting and exceeding any determinations we might wish to impose on it. It is the proximity of one to the other, the commitment of an approach, the one for the other, the very signifyingness of signification (5, my emphasis). The said is the thematic content of the saying, the usual focus of our interactions with others which subordinates to itself the saying even in its very moment of revelation (7). Applying this distinction to literature, Newton locates his narrative ethics in its saying—that is, the moment of encounter or contact when one reads a text. He explains, One faces a text as one might face a person, having to confront the claims raised by that very immediacy, an immediacy of contact, not of meaning" (Newton 1995, 11).

There are three aspects that Newton specifies in his narrative ethics, giving it a triadic structure: narrational ethics, representational ethics, and hermeneutic ethics (1995, 17–18). All three are closely intertwined. The first, narrational ethics, is the relational aspect of reading, the encounter with the saying of the text and the intersubjective responsibilities and claims which follow from acts of storytelling. Representational ethics designates the costs incurred in fictionalizing oneself or others by exchanging 'person' for 'character' (18), while hermeneutic ethics is closely connected to this, and designates the responsibilities incurred in each singular act of reading, responsibilities that accrue around the risk of representing other people. Integrating them, we might say that for Newton, as soon as we pick up a book we are forced to respond to it regardless of its content, in the same way that we must respond to a person, regardless of what they say: responsibility—the obligation to respond—comes before we are aware exactly what it is we are responsible for. This responsibility is, however, primarily to do with the risks of representing others, giving us the hermeneutical responsibility of navigating the tension between both trying to get the other's story, and the lesson that 'getting' someone else's story is also a way of losing them as 'real,' as 'what he is' (19), that is to say, of replacing a relation to the face, in Levinas's sense, which always exceeds our comprehension, with a relation to its image which is comprehensible. We will see what this means for the ethical reading of a novel when we delve deeper into Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day in a moment. The question of the ethics of representation, the ethics of the image, is a central concern for Levinas, though, and one to which I will return.

It should be clear that Newton's approach is not overtly concerned with the thematic engagements of novels, which is to say that his concern with content has to do with the way in which these ethical responses in reading are dramatised (Newton 1995, 67–68). Derek Attridge's (2004a) approach to ethics in his J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event has certain similarities to Newton's. Attridge does not consider contact with the text itself as a necessarily ethical moment. Nevertheless, he similarly deploys a Levinasian/Derridean conception of the other as exceeding our comprehension, arguing that an experience of alterity can occur in the reading of narrative. For Attridge, to speak about the ethics of literature is to speak about having an experience of otherness in the event of reading. This alterity is located in the originality or singularity of the piece of literature: "The experience of singularity involves an apprehension of otherness, registered in the event of its apprehension, that is to say, in the mental and emotional opening that it produces (Attridge 2004b, 67). The degree to which a work is original and singular is thus closely tied to the experience of alterity that it evokes, and so also to its ethics. Some works are more exemplary in this regard than others: the text that most estranges itself from the reader, makes the strongest ethical demand" (Attridge 2004a, 11). Coetzee's late modernist texts are for Attridge of this exemplary sort.

There is an intriguing section in the opening moves of Attridge's argument which indicates some of the distance between Attridge and Newton's approaches, and begins to show why I consider Attridge's too restrictive. It occurs in his discussion of the ethical and political benefit arising from the formal innovation of modernist texts.

To make this claim [about the ethics of formal singularity] is not to deny what has often been powerfully demonstrated: that a large part of modernist writing was insensitive to the otherness produced by patriarchal and imperialist policies and assumptions. [….] It is true that, with some notable exceptions, only in later developments of modernism have these [technical] resources been exploited in conjunction with a thematic interest in gender, race, and colonialism. (2004a, 6)

A distinction is drawn here between the technical resources of form and an alignment of those resources with the meanings of the text. This is a concern with thematic content that is distinct from Newton's. However, it needs to be asked, how does this approach deal with the question of meanings and their impact on readers? Is a singular, innovative novel that is in its content insensitive to otherness ethical? Wayne Booth  puts it well when he comments, "It is not the degree of otherness that distinguishes fiction of the highest ethical kind but the depth of education it yields in dealing with the 'other'" (1988: 195). Is ethics in a novel, then, reducible to the text's formal singularity?

Attridge wants to disrupt the opposition between form and meaning. He argues that "the literary use of language involves the performing of meanings and feelings, and that what has traditionally been called form is central to this performance" (2004a, 9). Although it is accurate to connect the meanings of a text to its form, this does not answer the question of their significance. To note the inextricability of form and meaning does not eliminate the fact that the same formal resources and innovations can be (and have been) an inextricable part of texts that are insensitive to alterity. Interestingly, this recognition does not prevent Attridge from emphasizing the formal inventiveness of a text. The importance of formal singularity for Attridge, irrespective of the ethics of the text's meanings, can be seen as he shifts his focus from literature in general to Coetzee's work in particular.

Otherness, then, is at stake in every literary work, and in a particularly conspicuous way in the work that disrupts the illusions of linguistic immediacy and instrumentality. Among these works are some in which otherness is thematized as a central moral and political issue, and in these works modernist techniques may play a peculiarly important role. Coetzee's novels are cases in point. (12)

Despite the reiteration in this passage of the distance from Newton in the importance of content, it also illustrates their proximity. Otherness, for Attridge, can be seen as present in every literary work (keeping in mind that for Attridge literature refers to works that are singular), irrespective of either the work being a modernist text, or, importantly, of the work's meanings. The issue is formal singularity or originality, and works that have thematised otherness as a concern are a specific type within this broad categorization—a distinction that implicitly includes within it those texts which are insensitive to otherness. Attridge appears, then, to call texts ethical that in his own terms of sensitivity to alterity are arguably also (thematically) not so. To locate the ethics of a work primarily in its inventiveness, in its singularity, can therefore be seen to overlook key ethical aspects present within its meanings.

It is not, it must be emphasised, that Attridge is unaware of other ethically salient aspects in the novel. This becomes explicit when he comments on the critique of colonialism and its avatars in Dusklands and In the Heart of the Country:

All this brutality and exploitation is certainly there in the novels to be felt and condemned, but it is not what makes them singular, and singularly powerful. It is what they do, how they happen, that matters: how otherness is engaged, staged, distanced, how it is manifested [...]. (30)

While this approach is perhaps effective for Coetzee's work (though not exclusively so, as will be seen), it is too restrictive for literature in general precisely due to this subordination of other ethical concerns to the manifestation of otherness, a subordination which, as the above has shown, results from the idea that Modernism's foregrounding of language and other discursive and generic codes through its formal strategies embodies the insight that literature's distinctive power and potential ethical force rests in precisely this opening a space for the apprehension of otherness (30).

What I find unsatisfactory about these two approaches, then, is the restriction of what is pertinent in reflecting upon the ethics of a novel. The exploration of environmental ethics and its tension with other ethical concerns in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide, which I will consider in the next chapter, cannot be reduced to a question of formal alterity, of evoking an experience of otherness, nor to the ethics of transforming people into characters. This is not to say that these are entirely absent, or that Attridge and Newton's approaches are unproductive. Indeed, the relation to others is often a significant