|
The
Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Contemporary British Fiction
Jean-Michel Ganteau
London: Routledge, 2015 Hardback.
179 p. ISBN 978-113890722. Ł90 e-book.
ISBN 978-1315696690. Ł21.53
Reviewed by Catherine
Bernard Université Paris Diderot
In this
new monograph, Jean-Michel Ganteau brings together many of the skeins of his
more recent research, from the philosophy of care to trauma literature, but The Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability
in Contemporary British Fiction is not only a cogent recapitulation of his
elected themes. It offers no less than an original poetics through which we may
be able to map out a vast tract of the fiction being currently produced in
Britain. One of its many strengths lies in the way the essay places itself at
the precise junction of the ethics and the aesthetics of reading. In that sense,
rarely has the pairing of the two notions—an epoch-defining conceptual
pair—been more aptly elaborated upon. While programmatic, the ethical reading
of form does not in the least imply that textuality is blindy harnessed to a
process of ontologising. On the contrary, Jean-Michel Ganteau never loses sight
of the agency of form and of the way literary form itself generates a specific
experience of ethics. The
ethical turn of literary theory has generated heated debates and has, in that
sense, been one of the most productive recent “turns” of criticism. Where Jean-Michel
Ganteau’s is an original voice is in the way he is always wary of placing his
interpretation in the wake of one single, stable vision of such ethics of form
and is on the contrary anxious to test the various traditions—some of them
relatively nascent ones—and bring them into fruitful tension. In that respect,
one should from the start be grateful to him for offering such a wide-ranging
and exhaustive map of the research done on the ethics of writing. Drawing from
comprehensive readings on the topic, he succeeds in tracing a path of his own
in what has become a fairly intense field of research. The introduction offers
in that sense an impeccable synthesis not only of the main themes and paradigms
of that specific critical area, but also of the possible dialectical
correlations to be established between theoretical strands whose differences
need to be heeded correctly for them to be truly productive. A well-known
specialist of trauma literature and of the ethics of reading—he has co-edited
two volumes on trauma fiction, with Susana Onega, also published by Routledge (Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British
Literature [2013] and Contemporary
Trauma Narrative. Liminality and the Ethics of Form [2014])—Ganteau is
careful for instance to clearly distinguish between the ethics of reception and
the philosophy of care, and establishes, for example, strategic links between
the politics of gender as explored and performed by fiction and the politics of
affect. In order
to achieve this, the essay draws not only from British and American theorists
of the ethics of literature—Martha Nussbaum among others—or of the philosophy
of care—among whom Judith Butler—but also from the French school of the philosophy
of vulnerability, from Sandra Laugier and Marie Gaille, to Guillaume Le Blanc
and Corinne Pelluchon. As often, one is struck here by a form of Zeitgeist logic, similar paradigms
emerging in the anglophone world and in France, although belatedly, while
failing to fully cohere. The present monograph may help thus to bridge the gap
between the variants of vulnerability studies, once again not so much with a
view to producing a coherent system but rather a productive dialogue between
complementary understandings of vulnerability as praxis. What the essay is
intent on showing is precisely how certain fictions leave text and reader
susceptible to a process of alteration that profoundly destabilises meaning all
the better to reactivate it as a form of enlightening without certainties. One
may read here some of the staple tenets of post-structuralism; where Jean-Michel
Ganteau truly innovates is in the way he succeeds in rearming meaning as
relationality, a relationality best performed and experienced by / through
fiction. In order
to do so, each of the four chapters focuses on two core texts and authors
offering strategic instanciations of the four main paradigms of the ethics and
aesthetics at stake. Each time, the analysis builds first on a thorough understanding
of the generic determinations at the heart of narrative ethics. Thus ethical
agency is shown to be produced by the text, rather then the text being
conceived as determined by some external program. The first chapter—“Romance
strategies”— turns to Jeanette Winterson’s The.PowerBook
(2000) and Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton
(1987). Romance, an overlooked mode when it comes to understanding the power of
contemporary fiction, is shown to destabilise “the dominant idiom of the novel”
[36]. Even more so, romance is here brought into very fruitful conjunction with
both a poetics of the frail body and a poetics of the fragment, so that
dislocation and experience enter into a complex dialectics. In Ackroyd’s case
the conventional critical emphasis on the “anxiety of influence” opens on a
radical rethinking of intertextuality as “vulnerability to other texts” [59]
which is interactive, “open” and “ruinous” [60]) at the same time, in keeping
with the experience of loss that informs his novel. Chapter
two—“Elegy”—turns to two relatively under-researched novelists: Anne Enright
with The Gathering (2007) and
Nicholas Royle with Quilt (2010). The
central paradigm is that of mourning and melancholy. Once again the analysis
goes against the grain of accepted conceptions of melancholy to show how
vulnerability to loss may in fact prove to be a force. The analysis of Royle’s
novel is the occasion for the definition of writing as “excarnation” [89], i.e. as the performance of loss. That
performance does not aim at producing any sublation of grief, but on the contrary
allows the texts to exist as ongoing performance and thus as “pure relation” [92].
Relationality is one of the key paradigms of the entire essay; it very
effectively weaves the main threads of the aesthetics of vulnerability into a
coherent fabric. The text’s relation to other texts as well as the characters’
own relation to experience, whether of love, grief or the collective, is in
turn reworked in the text’s relation to / with the reader. As already
noted in relation to Winterson and Ackroyd, such relationality yields no
cathartic experience but leaves us endlessly susceptible, vulnerable to the
othering produced by the text. Chapter
three—“Ghost Texts”—carries the exploration of loss over into a reading of Pat
Barker’s Another World (1998) and
Nina Allan’s short-story collection The
Silver Wind (2011). The choice of these two texts in itself testifies to a
desire to turn to less canonical fiction. Where one might have expected Jean-Michel
Ganteau to include a reading of Barker’s Regeneration
trilogy, he chose rather to focus on one of Barker’s more tentative fictions.
In both Another World and The Silver Wind, realism and romance are
conflated in such a way that “the narrative punctures and breaks open the
dominating idiom of realism” [102]. The risk-taking is here great as both
Barker and Allan deliberately eschew the reassuring norms of realism to lay
their texts open to the possibility of failure. Risk-taking and failure are two
other important notions to understand how the present essay sublates the more
conventional conceptions of the ethics of alterity. For Jean-Michel Ganteau, a
text’s capacity to take the risk of failure is also a way to truly, radically
undo the hegemony of coherence. Thus vulnerability works against the ideology
of the autonomous, self-enclosed text to delineate what is defined, after
Levinas, as “positive vulnerability”. This is
particularly clear in the last chapter of the essay—“State of the Nation”—in
which, one may argue, the ethics and aesthetics of vulnerability prove ultimately
to produce a politics of vulnerability. Once again, the analysis fruitfully turns to
texts which have not attracted yet the critical interest they deserve: Jon
McGregor’s Even the Dogs (2010) and
Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005).
Although the focus is on the unravelling of the collective fabric of
contemporary Britain, the two texts are read against the memory of Forster’s
imperative in Howards End to “only connect”.
In McGregor’s case, the sense of connectedness is achieved in the choral
structure of the novel which creates a sense of powerful, if diffuse agency.
Each narrator carries the ethical task of bearing witness to a process of
disenfranchisement that concerns us all. Both Even the Dogs and Saturday
are novels for “post-utopian times” [162], but their paradoxical agency lies in
their capacity to gesture to the possibility of a sense of ethics in spite of
the demise of utopia. That sense of ethics lies in the relationality and
commonality of affect as well as the acceptance that reading also means being
vulnerable to the affective power of a shared imagination. The Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability in
Contemporary British Fiction takes the risk of being thought-provoking
and of engaging not only with the most recent critical propositions on the
ethics of literature, but also with reading as an experience of othering. It
succeeds in reworking some of the most pressing issues in the field of critical
theory, from the dialectics of engagement and autonomy to the aesthetics of
democratic relationality, while making us hear anew some of the strongest
voices in contemporary British fiction; and one must add that the analysis
includes forays into many other novels. Its vast mastery of contemporary
critical debates, its capacity to push back the frontiers of literary ethics,
its sheer love of fiction and what it does to our sense of a shared world, make
for an enticing and illuminating reading experience. Its theoretical ambition
reaches beyond the sphere of contemporary British fiction, while also renewing
our understanding of its specific poetics. It will provide important keys to explore
the works of writers as diverse as Cormac McCarthy, W.G. Sebald, Sarah Kane or
Simon McBurney, and many others still, and to understand the ethical relevance
of literature to our sense of historicity, here and now. Jean-Michel Ganteau, The Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Contemporary British Fiction (London: Routledge, 2015)—Reviewed by Catherine Bernard, Université Paris Diderot
Cercles © 2016 All rights are reserved and no reproduction from this site for whatever purpose is permitted without the permission of the copyright owner. Please contact us before using any material on this website.
|
|
|
