Introduction to Ethical Literary Criticism

At the 12th Convention of the International Association for the Ethical Literary Criticism held at the Central China Normal University in Wuhan in July 2023, at the roundtable, a question was addressed to a philosopher participating in the discussion: what is the difference between ethics and morality? A question of long-standing was raised this time with a practical aim for those convened to discuss ethical criticism—to specify the subject of their study. The general agreement predictably was to consider morality concerned with regulations and norms as well as ethics with virtues and values. Morality cares more for propriety, while ethics cherishes the ideal of goodness.But does the task of ethical literary criticism agree with such perception? Or is there a different idea of ethics at work?At the convention, this was the issue of the three-day talks and discussions where the speakers frequently referred to the first book attempt in the field—Introduction to Ethical Literary Criticism by Nie Zhenzhao, a scholar whose initiative has given a decisive impetus to a new trend of critical thought. The Introduction was brought out in the China Perspectives collection with two forwards by Claude Rawson and Galin Tikhanov.It is no wonder that the idea, if not born there, was enthusiastically hailed and won the ground in China. In the decades following the disaster of the cultural revolution, Chinese academia was in haste to catch up with the achievements, or with what was in fashion, in the intellectual world. A lot is being translated from English and other languages. Russia is remarkably presented by Mikhail Bakhtin, though not he alone, as Bakhtinian study has been introduced in the universities as a major course. It has marked a turn from the former ideological dogma of Marxism, not rejected but transformed on the ground of culture with the ideas of responsibility and dialogue, at least, not less influential in China than that of the carnival that was first triumphant in the West. Chinese native cultural tradition was induced to go deep into ethical issues. The ethical idea was first picked up and then emphatically voiced by Chinese scholars at the time when the word seemed to have lost its importance in the postmodernist discord and to formulate as essential to the critical activity.Nie Zhenzhao starts with the definition: “Ethical literary criticism can be defined as a critical theory that approaches literary works and their authors from the perspective of ethics . . . it argues that literature is a form of ethical expression of human experiences in historical times” (13).This belief is, by no means, advanced as something unquestionably new but rather as an eternal belief innovated by the circumstances when it requires a reminder. The definition is preceded by the immediate sources of the ethical idea transplanted into the domain of literary study. The sources are traced back to the general liberation in the 1960s with, as a stepping stone in relation to literature, Wayne Clayson Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), where the morality of impersonal narration is explored. The final touch was given to Booth’s theory in the 1980s on the basis of Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism (1) that extends the ethical idea to the ethics of the text.Ethical criticism is advanced not as another critical trend with a special interest directed to one of the functions or aspects of literature, but it is an umbrella term and an approach ambitiously claiming its generalized significance due to the fact that only ethical literature can be viewed in its essential function dependent on its part in the creation of the human. Therefore, it is declared as an amendment on Darwin and Engels enriching the ideas of natural and economic selection by ethical selection that “endows human beings with reason and ethical consciousness, thus eventually turning them into ethical beings.” Literature, even at its early stage, like the Bible in the story of Adam and Eve, provides a persuasive case for the distinction between natural selection and ethical selection (27).“Persuasive cases” is what Zhenzhao’s Introduction focuses on in Part II “Ethical Literary Criticism. Case Studies.” There is much more in the book concerning the definition of ethical literary criticism and its sources, but the aim to present an eternal idea functionally as an instrument of contemporary perception would fail without demonstration of its practical use. If Part I focuses on the theory and historical transformation of ethical criticism, Part II with its five essays presents the analysis of literary works from different times and cultures in relation to ethics and myth. Mythological background almost invariably underlies the analyzed plots as it allows us to trace the movement from natural selection to “moral norms in historical times” (25).The structure at work in Part II is first brought forth in one of the first sections in Part I as a universal model for ethical criticism. “2 The Sphinx Factor and Ethical Selection”: “From the perspective of ethical literary criticism, the Sphinx’s Riddle can be seen as a self-inquiry into why humans are such beings, or to put it in another way, what constitutes the self” (28). The victory over Sphinx, when her riddle is solved, is the first step for the self-aware man on the way from natural to ethical selection: the first step and the one that is to be made over and over again in times to come and in the situations plot-bound in literature. The cases under view in Nie Zhenzhao’s book are the following:In Oedipus’s case, the Sphinx factor works directly as it is involved in the plot. “Oedipus’s solution to the riddle of the Sphinx makes it evident that he is the first person to define man” (110) and, though unintentionally, he is a criminal who has to atone for his crime, thus making his discovery.All other cases come from the late nineteenth to twentieth centuries. In Hardy’s work, the human predicament is born out of a clash between natural and social powers, treated by the author under the influence of Darwin, Spencer, and J. S. Mill. Hardy’s own contribution to this philosophical dispute is ethical but in a very broad sense—love and sympathy brought in by man moved not by biology alone but by the mysterious power of Nature that he belongs to and is tragically opposed by in his egoistic self. Hardy’s case is finally represented in the “Ethical Analysis of Tess of the d’Urbervilles” where cultural assumptions are not easily brought to terms with “the natural power of evolution” (123).Hemingway’s novella The Old Man and the Sea is analyzed with an ambitious aim “to take a departure” from the predominant praise for tough humanism reading it “against the theoretical framework of ethical literary criticism . . . as the conflict between two different ethical orders: the ethical structure of human society and the natural rule of the sea. Such a perspective aims to reexamine the failure of Santiago at sea as the dysfunction of the ethical rule of human society in the natural environment” (129).The Law of the Jungle is represented by the unbelievably great fish (marlin), by the sharks attacking and devouring the body of the fish—they all belong to the reality of the sea—and by the lions in Santiago’s dreams, as well as by the Old Man himself who is also one of this sea’s worlds, the world which is his reality, his dream, and his opponent. The Old Man has lost the battle this time but, losing, he is not defeated. “Santiago’s ethical choices can be interpreted as determined by his confusion of these two different systems of ethical orders: the ethics of human society and the ethics of nature” (134). Ethical bilingualism makes Hemingway’s hero great in his humanity.From the world’s classics, Zhenzhao passes on to the native material of China’s May Fourth poetry, “Poetic Revolution” that took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It marked a break with the classical tradition, a turn to Europe and to the vernacular style. The attitude to the classical tradition is considered in the light of ethical criticism and supported as the natural right of literature to be innovated in sensitivity, form, and language.The principles of ethical criticism are further explicated in the appendixes, among them “A Conceptual Map of Ethical Literary Criticism: An Interview with Nie Zhenzhao” by Charles Ross; “Ethical Literary Criticism: Oral Literature and the Formation Mechanism of Brain Text.”Ethical literary criticism by Nie Zhenzhao is remarkably representative of a Chinese contribution based on a broad and innovative acquaintance with the achievements in modern literary theory.