The Novel and the New Ethics by Dorothy J. Hale

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Novel and the New Ethics by Dorothy J. Hale Jesse Rosenthal HALE, DOROTHY J. The Novel and the New Ethics. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020. 360 pp. $90.00 hardcover; $30.00 softcover. Novel theory is well past the point where declaring an “ethical turn” would raise many eyebrows. The last two decades or so have proven particularly accommodating to critics who wish to assert the presence of some variation of ethical thought in the formal working of the traditional novel. Part of the compromise of the turn back to ethics has lain in stressing the formal nature of it all: as if to say, we’re not just looking at old-fashioned morals or narratorial lectures. What makes Dorothy J. Hale’s The Novel and the New Ethics different is that its analysis does assume design and intention from the start. Looking specifically at novelists who are directly concerned with the academic study of literature—Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith, and J. M. Coetzee, among others— Hale short-circuits the divide between literary production and analysis. In the works of her authors she locates a set of varied ethical projects that share an awareness of the poststructuralist critique of the individual subject. These critiques, and the related attack on a hoary novelistic ethics based around a stable central subject, succeed for Hale in producing a “new ethics”—one which takes the central human subject not as a given, but as a question. This new ethics moves away from one based on coherent subjectivity: the experiences of other intelligences and points of view. In place of this by-now familiar alterity, it finds instead more modern forms, which include experiences outside of the human: “the lives of animals, states of divinity, or even the nature of fiction” (6). The Novel and the New Ethics continues the project of Hale’s extraordinary 1998 Social Formalism, which charted the ethical stakes of novel form from Henry James through poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and race theory. The argument of that book— one which seems to be every bit as indisputable as it was twenty-five years ago—was that the Jamesian model of novel theory, centered around the figure of the author, cast such a large and inescapable shadow that it would be felt in criticism for a century to come. And in spite of the novelty of the ethical approaches The Novel and the New Ethics describes, it quickly becomes clear that the point of departure has not changed. As Hale puts it, “The novelist who most inspires and authorizes this tradition within the Anglo-American context is Henry James” (25). So we are still looking at the same strong influence, and, just as in Social Formalism, this influence persists whether or not we know it: [E]ven if no one thinks they give a damn about what Henry James knew, the modern novel that James helped to invent and the tradition of novel theory that he inaugurated provide a foundational aesthetics for the novel that underlies [both ethics of alterity and] the poststructuralist new ethical theory that has [End Page 450] developed in the attempt to articulate the positive social value of literature for our postmodern age. (181) In this way, Hale’s work extends her previous argument about the Jamesian tradition into a twenty-first century that might seem to have little to do with him. Where this book parts company with Social Formalism, though, is in its shift of focus from the history of academic novel theory to what Hale refers to as “novelist-critics”: modern novelists who are in explicit conversation with academic criticism (89). Foremost among these are Morrison, Smith, and Coetzee. Though Hale is interested in the intersection between theory and practice in these authors, it often seems that theory is dominant. When she discusses Morrison, she does so in the context of Morrison’s writing on James and William Faulkner; when she turns to Smith, it is in her invocation of Elaine Scarry; and in writing on Coetzee, an academic himself, she focuses on his Elizabeth Costello—a novel that draws centrally on a novelist’s relation with academia. The Novel and the New Ethics...