The Novel and the New Ethics by Dorothy J. Hale

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Novel and the New Ethics by Dorothy J. Hale Frederick W. Feldman Hale, Dorothy J. 2020. The Novel and the New Ethics. Post*45. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. $90.00 hc. $30.00 sc. xxii + 330 pp. Ethics has been steadily taking center stage in literary studies, and Dorothy J. Hale’s new monograph pushes it to the fore of the conversation. Perennial concerns about the novel’s commodification, domination, and representations of otherness and subalternity all bespeak ethical consternation. At the same time, defenses of the humanities often appeal to literary reading’s promotion of empathy or justice. This concern with ethics and human rights is not restricted to the academy, as even a brief look at the last few decades of Pulitzer Prize-winning novels shows. Hale has recognized this renewed focus on ethics and argues that it grows directly out of the tradition of Henry James. Thus, The Novel and the New Ethics makes ethics definitional to the Anglo-American novel. In Hale’s theory of the novel, the genre is protean but not formless. Rather, “the novelistic aesthetics of alterity” (xi) is driven by the particular ethical demands posed by a given novel’s program of characterological autonomy. With that said, Hale refuses to endorse a particular ethical theory or argue that the novel qua novel actually has ethical import—this is a formal theory of the novel within a specific (though extensive) Jamesian Anglo-American tradition. As such, the book is first and foremost a literary history. Chapter 1 is where Hale works out the feature claim of the book, focusing on contemporary novels. While Hale identifies novelistic ideas of characterological autonomy in the work and craft-talk of earlier [End Page 790] authors, James is the writer who “most inspires and authorizes” this tradition of novelistic ethics; he is the “fountainhead for the aesthetics of alterity” (25). To draw this Jamesian genealogy, Hale summons a variety of textual support to write a sometimes surprising literary history. Whereas modernism is generally understood as a “break” from the explicit ethical concerns characterizing the periods that both precede and follow it (and recent work on the novel of human rights has reiterated this view), Hale provocatively argues that modernism is where the idea that narrative necessarily implies an ethics solidifies. Particular attention is given to the novelists’ own comments on their work, and Hale excels at this sort of close reading. Taking passages from Gish Jen’s lectures and reading them against Virginia Woolf’s essays, for example, Hale draws out surprising commonalities and material differences between the ethical attitudes expressed and metaphors employed, yet always finds something that points back to James. An impressive amount of contemporary novelists are touched on in a dense and persuasive chapter. The survey in the first chapter also serves to show the degree to which the new ethical turn in novel-writing has made the author’s ethical attitudes part of the conversation. This scrutiny, however, is not all that new. In Chapter 2, Hale turns to the source with a reading of What Maisie Knew. Her project is as much about how the inheritors of James’s tradition have received and responded to his stated goals and how they evaluate whether Maisie lives up to them as it is about how the ethics of otherness are felt in the novel itself. Hale begins the chapter not with James but with Toni Morrison mentioning James, continuing the book’s project of showing his contemporary influence. The dual approach of both examining James’s aesthetics of alterity in Maisie while also tracing its reception among other authors and critics makes this chapter a particularly effective close reading. Chapters 3 and 4 are close readings of novels by Zadie Smith and J. M. Coetzee. In Chapter 3, Hale examines On Beauty in light of Smith’s stated ethical goals and modernist influences—taken from interviews, essays, and allusions to other works—and, importantly, argues for how the novel itself, its aesthetics driven by its particular ethical problems, differs from those other genres. An unexpected but intriguing comparative reading of William Faulkner investigates style’s ethical implications. Hale ends...