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Criticism and Evaluation of Nie Zhenzhao's <em>Studies of Ethical Literary Criticism</em>

2021; University of Arkansas Press; Volume: 55; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/style.55.4.0573

2374-6629

Junwu, Yingjie,

Chinese history and philosophy

Ethical literary criticism, a highly original and self-contained critical approach proposed by Nie Zhenzhao, has witnessed a robust development in both China and parts of the world ever since its debut in 2004. Many Chinese and foreign scholars of considerable stature have gravitated toward this vigorous theory and produced a multitude of academic outcomes. These efforts have culminated in the publication of five works, namely A Study on the Theory of Ethical Literary Criticism, Ethical Literary Criticism of American Literature, Ethical Literary Criticism of English Literature, Ethical Literary Criticism of Japanese Literature, and Ethical Literary Criticism of Chinese Literature, drawing a fruitful conclusion to the major project of “Ethical Literary Criticism: Theoretical Construction and Critical Practice Studies” sponsored by the Chinese National Social Science Foundation. The five-volume canon serves as a milestone, marking the greatest development and perfection of ethical literary criticism that is of both Oriental and Occidental characteristics.According to Thomas Kuhn, “because the emergence of a new theory breaks with one tradition of scientific practice and introduces a new one conducted under different rules and within a different universe of discourse, it is likely to occur only when the first tradition is felt to have gone badly astray” (85–86). The completion and publication of Studies of Ethical Literary Criticism can be regarded as an emergence of a new theory and a literary response to the theory crisis of China and the Western world, which is typified by Chinese “theory aphasia” and the international “ethical turn.” In China, lack of theory confidence has subjected many scholars to theoretical porters rather than theoretical thinkers, who have inserted a variety of Western literary theories to Chinese theoretical fields without constructing their own. With the deluge of Western literary theories in China, Chinese scholars have collectively suffered from what Cao Shunqing terms “theory aphasia.” As Cao bewails, “For quite a long time, China's modern and contemporary studies of literary theories have been dominated by a whole system of Western discourses, and the Chinese critics have been in a state of aphasia in the expression, communication and interpretation of China's own literary theories” (51).Internationally, Western countries, which used to be the birthplaces of new theories during previous centuries, have also suffered aphasia in the late twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries. As Terry Eagleton notoriously observes in After Theory, “the golden age of cultural theory is long past” (1).1 Eagleton's observation has its echo in other Western scholars such as Paul de Man and Stein Olsen, who even pronounced the “end of literary theory” and “death of literary theory.” On the international ruins of theoretical nihilism, a minor movement with the name of “ethical turn” emerged inconspicuously in Western countries. The purpose of the “ethical turn” was to redress the over-stressed aesthetic trend in literary criticism that valued literary forms and ignored literary ethics since the notorious initiation of Oscar Wilde's “art for art's sake.” In spite of the pioneering efforts in the “ethical turn” done by scholars such as J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Harpham, David Parker, and Robert Eaglestone, the contemporary Western ethical criticism has remained what Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack call “the simplistic, uncomplicated prescription of external ethical forces regarding so many different literatures and cultures” (x). Facing the Chinese theory aphasia and the international theory crisis, Nie has engaged himself with a historical task to provide a theoretical system and a practical paradigm to the theory crisis in China as well as the international world by constructing a literary theory characteristic of both Oriental and Occidental cultures.One sense of a scientific theory or paradigm, according to Thomas Kuhn, lies in that “it stands for the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques and so on shared by the members of a given community” (175). The reason why ethical literary criticism is accepted in China as well as parts of the world as a literary theory lies in that Nie has constructed a conceptual constellation of ethical literary criticism, exemplified by “ethical taboo,” “ethical environment,” “ethical identity,” “ethical selection,” “Sphinx factor,” and “brain text,” to name just a few. All these concepts are not isolated from each other, but function as a systematic satellite constellation where different “satellites,” placed in sets of complementary “orbital planes,” rotate around “the Earth,” namely the kernel idea of ethical literary criticism—“ethical selection.” In A Study on the Theory of Ethical Literary Criticism, the first volume of the canon, Nie and Wang believe that “ethical selection is not only the kernel conception of ethical literary criticism, but also its theoretical cornerstone” (1). In the long history of human civilization, mankind underwent two fundamental processes of selection: natural selection and ethical selection. Natural selection allowed human beings to evolve from apes to men physically, whereas ethical selection distinguished them from animals spiritually. Around the ethical selection, other questions come into being, such as the ethical environment in which human beings are situated, the ethical taboos they have to know, and the animal factor (one part of the Sphinx factor) of which they have to get rid.It needs great theoretical courage for Nie to advocate and perfect his ethical literary criticism in China's academic environment in which many leading scholars, contaminated by Russian Formalism and New Criticism, have expressed hostile ridicules of ethical literary criticism. Even when it is well received in China today, ethical literary criticism still suffers from critical cavils. Such a backlash against ethical literary criticism reflects, in Terry Eagleton's words in his The Event of Literature, “one of the great clichés of modern criticism” that “teaching and preaching are fatal to literary art.” Eagleton further comments in a sarcastic vein: “that even a touch of didacticism is distasteful is as received a judgment for the literary establishment as the suggestion that Shakespeare wrote some rather impressive stuff.” In Eagleton's opinion, “didactic simply means a matter of teaching, and there is no reason why all teaching should be hectoring or doctrinaire” (68–69). Eagleton's justification of didacticism resonates with what Nie says in “Towards an Ethical Literary Criticism”: “aesthetic appreciation serves the means for us to read and interpret literature or to help us to receive moral teaching” (88).In fact, it is not uncommon for many serious writers to associate literature with ethical duty. For instance, at the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm, William Faulkner delivered a speech stating that a writer's duty is to describe a man's soul and spirit “capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance” (71). It is natural for writers to embellish their moral intentions with poetic languages, and it is incumbent for ethical literary critics to fathom them out and convey them to common readers in a lucid and logical way. Inheriting such ethical assertions of foreign writers and scholars, Nie's ethical literary criticism goes beyond the limited horizon of literature for a greater cause that aims at developing Chinese people's moral sense toward national progress: “to offer moral examples for human beings to follow, to enrich their material and spiritual life with moral guidance, and to achieve their self-perfection with moral experience” (Nie, “Towards” 88).In order to make his ethical literary criticism accepted by the Chinese literary community, Nie at first justifies the validity of ethical literary criticism in actual critical activities. Moral evaluations of literature are not fresh, as is seen in previous literary criticism. However, unlike traditional moral criticism that “simply evaluates a given literary work as good or bad on the basis of today's moral principles,” ethical literary criticism accentuates “the examination of the ethical values in a given work with reference to a particular historical context or a period of time in which the text under discussion is written” (Nie, “Towards” 84). Nie's emphasis on ethical elements in literary texts stems from his perspicacious viewpoint expressed in an article with the title of “Value Choice and the Theoretical Construction of Ethical Literary Criticism,” namely, “literature originates in the ethical expression of human needs” and it is “the product of morality” (71). This judgment naturally incurs some Chinese scholars' doubts, as they are so inured to Western literary theories that they either follow the Russian Formalists, Prague Structuralists, and American New Critics who limit their attention to aesthetic values of literature, or join the trend toward pan-cultural studies that regard literature as a type of ideological discourse subject to extrinsic factors. While the former is often lost in the labyrinth of literary details, the latter, as Harold Bloom criticizes, tends to lead “the world of letters” to “a Hobbesian realm of pure strategy and strife” (7). By concentrating on the ethical essence of literature, ethical literary criticism makes allowances for both textual and historical aspects of literature.While constructing his theory and paradigm of ethical literary criticism, Nie also solves the problem of theory integration. As is universally known, the history of critical theories is one full of rife and dissonance. The twentieth century, for instance, witnessed several quarrels between different schools of literary theories. New Criticism argues against the old emotionally charged reading of texts and treats literary studies as the equivalent of the sciences rather than the articulation of individual perceptions and feelings; Deconstruction destabilizes binary oppositions, the basis of Structuralism, by finding something belonging to both sides of the slash; New Historicism, in contrast to Old Historicism, elevates historical contexts from mere backdrop of literature to crucial discursive force. Overall, the de-facto dichotomy between “literary theory” and “philosophy of literature” leads to a tense scenario where, as is argued by Eagleton in his The Event of Literature, “literary theorists tend to give short shrift to questions of truth, reference, the logical status of fiction and the like, while philosophers of literature often display a marked insensitivity to the texture of literary language” (xi). Unlike these intolerant and aggressive theories, ethical literary criticism holds an eclectic attitude toward other theories, because ethics itself is considered by Geoffrey Harpham as “a matrix, a hub from which the various discourse and disciplines fan out and at which they meet, crossing out of themselves to encounter the other” (17). In A Study on the Theory of Ethical Literary Criticism, the ethical approach exhibits great potential to throw new light on literary canons by cooperating with aestheticism, psychoanalytic criticism, postcolonialism, ecocriticism, narratology, existentialism, and Marxism and so on.Ethics and aesthetics are arguably the most conflicting duo. John Keats's poetic line “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” and Oscar Wilde's motto “art for art's sake” are frequently quoted to protect art and literature from subordination to any moral or didactic purposes. However, the popular understanding of the two aphorisms is not very accurate. As Andrew Bennett points out, “discussing the truth value of Keats's equation of beauty and truth in the final lines of ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is likely to seem—from the institutional perspective of at least twentieth-and twenty-first-century Anglo-American literary studies—to miss the point, or to be attending to far less than the full point of the lines” (46). In other words, the “beauty is truth” statement is extracted from Keats's poem and dealt with in isolation for a general philosophical or aesthetic exploration, while the relationship between poetry and knowledge is extremely complex and esoteric. As for Oscar Wilde, the renowned bohemian flâneur does not reject morality once and for all. He attended John Ruskin's lecture series The Aesthetic and Mathematic Schools of Art and agreed with Ruskin's belief that beauty must be allied with and applied to moral good for the betterment of society, which is reflected in the excerpt from his political essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”: “Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine” (16). It is not unexpected that Wilde's negotiation between moral concern and aesthetic refinement has been a scholarly focus in recent years. Observing this critical phenomenon, Nie begins his argumentation that there is a close affinity between ethics and aesthetics by quoting another line, namely, the “Virtue is beauty” (396) put forward by William Shakespeare in Twelfth Night. Nie's conclusion is succinct and profound: the consummation of life is achieved by the unification of beauty and goodness, which should be a perennial motif in literature.It is also necessary to mention the combination of ethical literary criticism and eco-criticism to see how ethics, generally regarded as a moral sense of right and wrong in human society, has extended to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively the land. In effect, early in 1949 Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There proposed three levels of ethics: (1) relation between individuals, (2) relation between the individual and society, (3) man's relation to land and to animals and plants that grow upon it (202–3). Accordingly, Leopold offered an ecologically based “land ethic” that “reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land” (221). This antianthropocentric view dovetails with ethical literary criticism in the sense that they both call for men's moral responsibility. However, it is worth noting that ethical literary criticism objects to anthropocentrism in the same way that it objects to eco-centrism, because solutions to the ecological problems can only come from humans. Therefore, Nie argues in an article entitled “From Anthropocentrism to Human Subjectivity” that “mankind should clearly understand its subjective identity and its responsibilities as the subject.Despite our inability to be the centre of nature, human beings can still play a subjective role in nature, and, by making ethical choices wisely, find a way out of the ecological apocalypse” (22). Nie presents how the double critical perspectives can be used in analyzing works like Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. From the perspective of ethical literary criticism, this novel actually depicts Santiago's ethical chaos of struggling with a giant marlin, and his killings of the sharks represent not so much a human invasion to ecological environment as his acceptance of the law of the jungle at the cost of social ethics.Of course, A Study on the Theory of Ethical Literary Criticism does not encompass all the possibilities that ethics will merge with other critical approaches. Reader-response theory, for instance, also contains ethical aspects. Wayne Booth points out that “much of what looks like purely aesthetic or intellectual quality in a character may in fact have a moral dimension that is highly effective, though never openly acknowledged between author and reader” (131). That is to say, there exists a continuous interchange between the author and the reader: the former knows and transmits certain knowledge to the latter, who then becomes more knowledgeable both about particular characters and about life or morality more generally, and gains, in the process of reading, something of the moral vision of the author. This point is confirmed in W. J. Harvey's introduction to the widely circulated Penguin paperback edition of Middlemarch: “The moral vision embodied in Middlemarch creates a corresponding response in the reader. By her method of interweaving concurrent stories, by the proliferation of characters, by the complicated structure of parallels and contrasts, George Eliot bestows upon the reader a wide variety of viewpoints, of changing perspective, which enlarge our understanding both of the fictional world and of the real world” (21). There are still further views that might be taken of the integration of ethical literary criticism and other critical theories, and they are left to abler pens and future observations.In addition to theoretical integration, ethical literary criticism bespeaks its textual inclusiveness in actual critical practices, as can be seen in this newly published canon that covers a wide temporal span from ancient times to the present. Although the socio-historical contexts of the works are distinct, ethical literary criticism still functions appropriately to offer illuminating insights into the disparate texts. By contrast, many literary theories have seen their better days, with each having ruled its own period and later expired. Formalism, for instance, arises under the distinctive historical conditions in which literary works no longer appear to serve any very definite social function. When the historical context in which formalism is produced has developed into a modern era that no longer regards literature as exclusively textual existence, formalism naturally loses its glamor and becomes a rather pedantic craft.The situation appears no better for cultural theories devoted to extra-textual factors. Bloom finds it absurd to interpret Shakespeare's Tempest as “postcolonial allegory or anti-imperialist satire,” because such hindsight neglects to do justice to the Bard's “final full-scale originality” (72). Although Bloom's attitude toward historicizers of Shakespeare seems unduly strict and impatient, he does point out a fact that interpretation based on present-day cultural theories, no matter how innovative and insightful it is, ineluctably wreaks an anachronistic havoc on previous works. Fortunately, ethical literary criticism can avoid this theoretical hazard as much as possible, since it always attempts to restore literary texts to their original socio-historical and ethical contexts.According to Thomas Kuhn, “a scientific community consists of men who share a paradigm” (176). After 16 years of theoretical constructions and practical applications of ethical literary criticism in Oriental and Occidental literature, Nie has not only created a completed constellation of ethical literary theories, but also attracted and gathered a large number of scholars, Chinese and foreign, who identify, follow, and participate in this theoretical paradigm, which forms what Thomas Kuhn terms “a scientific community.” The publication of the five-volume canon of Studies of Ethical Literary Criticism has witnessed Nie's role as the pioneer of ethical literary criticism and the crystallization of collective wisdom. Many Chinese leading scholars such as Shang Biwu, Su Hui, Luo Lianggong, and Wang Songlin, participated in the state-fund sponsored five-volume project whose purpose is to apply ethical literary criticism in the concrete analyses of Oriental and Occidental literary texts.However, with so many scholars participating in the five-volume canon of textual explication of Oriental and Occidental literature with the guiding paradigms of ethical literary criticism, organic integration becomes a great challenge for Nie and the members of the ethical literary criticism community. For achieving this goal, Nie and his followers have to surmount two difficulties that an academic canon as large as this one invariably encounters, especially when it comes to specific critiques of a host of literary works through the prism of ethical literary criticism. The first difficulty pertains to what genres of literature should be included, since literature is so wonderfully omnivorous that its definition and contents vary greatly with the changing ages. Gu Mingdong argues that in the current postliterary era, “a literary work is a cohabitation of images and words, verbal and visual signs, a montage or collage of discursive and nondiscursive language” (178). However, this canon in hand still takes a traditional view of literary classification, since its main purpose is to present exemplary case studies that integrate ethical perspectives into literary interpretation.Whereas there are some discussions of Western drama, Western poetry, Classical Chinese poetry, and Japanese monogatari, the majority of texts fall into the category of fiction. To be specific, in Ethical Literary Criticism of American Literature, nine out of 10 chapters offer the ethical readings of important fictional works that fall into the categories of romantic fiction, realistic fiction, bildungsroman, “Lost-Generation” fiction, war fiction, southern fiction, African American fiction, Chinese American fiction, and Jewish American fiction. In Ethical Literary Criticism of English Literature, six out of the nine chapters involve the ethical explorations of eighteenth-century fiction, Victorian fiction, aesthetic fiction, modernist fiction, contemporary fiction, and postcolonial fiction. In Ethical Literary Criticism of Japanese Literature, nine out of the 12 chapters concentrate on the genre of fiction, adopting the ethical perspective to unpack Kinsei novels, I-novels, Shirakaba-ha novels, Yoyuha novels, left-wing novels, and fictional works written by Junichiro Tanizaki, Kawabata Yasunari, Kenzaburo Oe, and Haruki Murakami. In Ethical Literary Criticism of Chinese Literature, six out of the 10 chapters interpret narrative and fictional works including Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, Water Margin, Sanyan trilogy, condemnation novels in the Late Qing Dynasty, Lu Xun's fiction, and avant-garde fiction.This uneven distribution is unsurprising because the world has witnessed a dramatic expansion and diversification of the market for fiction, a genre that almost shapes our cognition of literature. In 1899, Henry James envisaged a prosperous future for the novel: “In the flare of railway bookstalls, in the shop-fronts of most booksellers, especially the provincial, in the advertisements of the weekly newspapers, and in 50 places besides, this testimony to the general preference triumphs, yielding a good-natured corner at most to a bunch of treatises on athletics or sport, or a patch of theology old and new” (101). Now, a popular taste has established fiction as a universal form that is conveniently amenable to ethical literary criticism.Fiction, as an important narrative form, is initially primed for edifying the public, about which Ian Watt claims that in fiction “the ethical scale has been so internalised and democratised that, unlike the scale of achievement common in epic or romance, it is relevant to the lives and actions of ordinary people” (78). Such a statement finds an echo in F. R. Leavis' study of Jane Austen, one of the novelists who was deemed as part of the “Great Tradition.” Leavis indicates that Austen does not offer “an ‘aesthetic’ value that is separable from moral significance. The principle of organization, and the principle of development, in her work is an intense moral interest of her own in life … Without her intense moral preoccupation she wouldn't have been a great novelist” (7). In fact, this moral standpoint dominates Leavisite criticism on George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, and other novelists, showing a strong nexus between morality and fictionality. It stands to reason that most critical essays in this canon center around novels or short stories, since moral and ethical elements are intrinsic to fiction.Another difficulty for Nie and his followers is to decide on the way by which the monographs are organized across the four national groups of literary works. In order to give a panoramic picture of the central and recurring ethical features in American literature, English literature, Japanese literature, and Chinese literature, this canon by and large arranges the relevant monographs thematically rather than chronologically, though such an arrangement itself slightly implies a temporal order. Ethical Literary Criticism of American Literature, for instance, unpacks some representative works belonging to different literary schools such as romanticism and realism, which somehow suggests that fashions in art and literature come and go. In the specific critiques, a historical dimension is always taken into consideration for the purpose of positioning the works and the characters thereof back in their original social contexts with the corresponding ethical principles. It is worth noting that in Ethical Literary Criticism of Japanese Literature, four chapters are respectively set for four prominent Japanese writers, namely Junichiro Tanizaki, Kawabata Yasunari, Kenzaburo Oe, Haruki Murakami, which shows that this newly published canon manages to strike a balance between theoretical fastidiousness and practical flexibility. Of course, some chronological clarity is thereby lost, but this deficiency is remedied by the unified and argumentative understanding of the ethical issues in literature.It is no exaggeration to argue that ethical literary criticism has a universal value. Although universality is a word tinged with totalitarian color, it is indeed the ultimate goal that numerous literary theories hanker after but fail to accomplish. For instance, Northrop Frye's archetypal criticism, by drawing on Carl Jung's theories about the collective unconscious, postulates that literature as a whole comprises one complete story called the mono-myth that can be best diagrammed as a circle containing four separate phases, with each phase corresponding to a season of the year and to peculiar cycles of human experience (160). In spite of its significance as a theory of archetypal criticism, there are at least two problems as regards its universality. First, Jung's collective unconscious itself is problematic because it is highly Eurocentric, and the archetypes he deciphers may not be recognizable to people in other areas, say Asia. Second, a set of archetypal frameworks may blind critics to the rich textual details as well as the artistic voice spoken in a variety of accents, rhythms, and registers, animating and modifying the patterns of literary rhetoric. By comparison, ethical literary criticism is based on “ethical selection” experienced by all humankind and attentive to both textual and extra-textual features of Oriental and Occidental cultures. Nearly all the literary works of the world can be analyzed through the prism of ethical literary criticism.More than suggesting a welcome for different literary theories and literary works written in a variety of time periods and places, ethical literary criticism signifies Nie's ambition to establish a system of world literature based on ethical awareness. Early in 1827, Johann Wolfgang Goethe used the concept of Weltliteratur to denote the international circulation and reception of literary works in Europe, including those of non-Western origin. As a literary celebrity who had contributed much to German literature, Goethe surpassed provincial nationalism and envisaged an international community of literature: “I am more and more convinced that poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere and at all times in hundreds and hundreds of men … National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach” (132).Twenty years or so later, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels reiterated the concept of world literature in their Manifesto of the Communist Party to describe the cosmopolitan character of bourgeois literary production: “In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations… The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature” (12–13). Whereas Goethe's forward-looking vision is ascribable to his profound understanding of the law of literary development, Marx and Engels regard world literature as an inevitable consequence of capitalistic production and global marketization.The field of world literature continues to generate debate, with new scholarly publications attempting to define the field and to propose effective modes of research and teaching. Nie's blueprint for world literature based on ethical literary criticism has a people-oriented attribute, as it is deeply entrenched in ethical experiences shared universally by people of the world: their intelligence, toughness, and capacity to dream, as well as their lies, blind spots, and lapses of courage and good will.All in all, ethical literary criticism has transcended the theoretical scope to accommodate variegated connotations, and the theory itself has become a research object. As Tian Junwu observes, “Nie's ethical literary criticism, constructed in the era of Western ethical turn and rooted in Chinese literary and cultural soil, has become an important literary methodology in analyzing Eastern and Western literary texts” (417). In this regard, the 2020 publication of the “Study of Ethical Literary Criticism” canon marks a significant event that not only encapsulates the previous achievements but also prefigures future happenings. All of these events actually come down to what Derek Attridge claims: literature itself is an initial “event which opens new possibilities of meaning and feeling” (59). Much like literature that is constantly read, reread, described, evaluated, and appreciated, the newest publication about ethical literary criticism is available for public scrutiny. We would like to express our opinion on the minute lacunae of this significant canon.Of course, there is no need for any reticence that this canon also has some defects. First, while Nie argues that his theory is characteristic of Chinese features, this canon still has some negligence on some Chinese traditional theories, such as those proposed by ancient Chinese theorists. Second, this canon is not large enough, since it only consists of American literature, English literature, Japanese literature, and Chinese literature. The literary treasures hidden in the cracks and crevices of the world are waiting for ethical literary critics' discovery and exploration. Third, Nie argues in his “Towards an Ethical Literary Criticism” that unlike traditional moral criticism, ethical literary criticism examines “the ethical values in a given work with reference to a particular historical context or a period of time in which the text under discussion is written” (84). However, the tricky problem is that it is almost impossible to restore a specific historical context, as history itself is a man-made construct. Under such circumstances, ethical literary critics may need to refer to as many evidential materials as possible such as (auto)biographies, letters, news reports, magazine articles, and diaries, so as to approach the ethical mores of a given historical period as close as possible. The future look of ethical literary criticism is beyond our theoretical imagination, but one thing is for sure: as China furthers reform and opening-up and Chinese culture continues to go global, ethical literary criticism will definitely become more influential in the international academia.