Reading Levinasian Notions of Alterity and the Ethics of Pla
Kenneth Womack and William Baker
Altoona College, Pennsylvania State University
Penn State Altoona, 3000 Ivyside Park, Altoona, PA 16601
Email: [email protected]
Abstract Questions about ethics continue to exert a profound influence upon the
direction of contemporary literary criticism. In addition to tracing the evolution
of ethical criticism as an interpretive form, this essay explores the ways in which
the critical paradigm’s twenty-first-century manifestations continue to address
literature’s ethical motivations and import. As a form of case-study, this essay
examines Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End both in terms of the ethical framework
in which the novel’s characters coexist as well as the moral crises following the
Great War and the conflict’s substantial influence upon the abidingly complex
interrelationship between French and British culture and society. Through this
lens, we can understand the manner in which Ford’s tetralogy encounters a number
of revealing aspects of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophies of the self, alterity,
and otherness. Drawing upon Levinas’s critical matrix of alterity, a reading of
Ford’s ethical imperatives in Parade’s End demonstrates the author’s considerable
humanistic agenda for “altering” our perspectives of war and atrocity via his wellhoned
and influential Impressionistic techniques.
Keywords Ethical criticism; Ford, Ford Madox; Impressionism; Levinas,
Emmanuel; Moral philosophy; Selfhood
Authors Kenneth Womack is Professor of English and Integrative Arts at Penn
State Altoona, where he also serves as Senior Associate Dean for Academic
Affairs. He is the author of three award-winning novels — John Doe No. 2 and
the Dreamland Motel (2010), The Restaurant at the End of the World (2012),
and Playing the Angel (2013). Womack is also the author or editor of numerous
works of nonfiction, including Long and Winding Roads: The Evolving Artistry of
the Beatles (2007) and The Beatles Encyclopedia, Everything Fab Four (2014);
William Baker is Distinguished Research Professor of English, Northern Illinois
University.
A Brief History of Anglo-American Literature and Ethical Criticism
Questions about ethics continue to exert a profound influence upon the direction
of contemporary literary criticism. Yet, as Geoffrey Galt Harpham observes in
Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society, ethical criticism functions
in the eyes of many literary scholars as an “alien discourse” that challenges or
undermines the theoretical project’s capacity for promoting “literature’s immediacy,
concreteness, vitality, and affective richness” (ix). During the last two decades,
ethical criticism’s fusion with continental philosophy has produced a more
theoretically rigorous form of literary critique that continues to elevate its status as
a viable interpretive mechanism. In contrast with North American variations of the
paradigm that find their origins in Kantian moral philosophy and troll dangerously
close to the shoals of moral relativism, ethical criticism’s European manifestations
offer a more forceful analysis by emphasizing continental philosophy’s various and
ongoing accounts of alterity, otherness, and phenomenology. While both schools of
thought may hale from decidedly different venues of intellectual thought, ethical
criticism’s various manifestations demonstrate the theoretical project’s larger
interest in assessing the value systems that inform our textual interpretations.
As recent evidence has shown, ethical criticism’s Anglo-American emergence
during the latter half of the twentieth century is enjoying yet another renaissance,
particularly in the Eastern academy—namely, China—as thinkers in the new
century ponder the significance of addressing literature’s ethical motivations and
import.
To begin, ethical criticism can be most usefully understood through two
principal spheres of thought:
1. as an “interpretive paradigm that explores the nature of ethical issues from
their considerable roles in the creation and interpretation of literary works”
(Womack 167);
2. as a philosophical matrix that “refers to the inclusion of ethical components
in the interpretation and evaluation of art” ( Peek).
Moreover, ethical criticism may be regarded as a meeting between the two
polarities of moralism, which contends that the aesthetic value of art should be
determined by or reduced to its “moral” value, and autonomism, which challenges
our notions about whether it is appropriate to apply moral categories to art that
should be evaluated by aesthetic standards alone.
Among Anglo-American academic circles, it must be understood that there are
signal differences between British and American manifestations of ethical criticism.
The revival of ethical criticism as an interpretative paradigm during the last two
decades of the twentieth century finds its origins as a response, especially in the mid
to late 1980s, to poststructuralist theoretical concerns such as deconstruction and
the development of postmodernism as a set of theoretical positions. Many of these
theoretical thrusts had their origins in post-Second World War French philosophical
thought influenced by earlier German thinkers such as Husserl, Heidegger, and
others (see Abrams and Harpham 56). French philosophical thought — as espoused,
for instance, by leading players such as Derrida — exerteda powerful impact
upon American academe, especially in the form of key professorial appointments
during the early 1980s in prestigious East Coast institutions. The ensuing reactions
subsequently led to the development of various socially challenging modes of
critical thinking — for example, gender studies, historical criticism, anti-theory,
and eco-criticism, among others.
As one of the critical zeitgeist’s key late-twentieth-century movements,
ethical criticism may be regarded as a sociocultural reaction toa host of critical
and philosophical antecedents.In literary studies, we can find these roots in
much earlier works, such as Tolstoy’s classic “What Is Art?”and Oscar Wilde’s
Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray in which he asserts that moral merits and
defects should not influence aesthetic considerations.Other examples of earlier
exponents of ethical criticism may be found also in the work of the great Russian
critics Alexander Voronski and Mikhail Bakhtin, whose literary criticism can be
understood as essentially “ethical” in nature.1 Contextually, ethical criticism and
other interpretive forms find their origins in the Anglo-American academy and in
the institutionalization of English studies and literary theory, particularly in the
United States. In Europe, on the other hand — and namely in France and Germany
— there has been a striking tendency to examine ethical aesthetics in terms of
their philosophical implications rather than, as in the United Kingdom, from the
perspective of cultural studies.
Scholars in British academic circles have explored ethical literary
considerations since the early twentieth century, as evinced by F. R. Leavis
and Christopher Norris, among others. Indeed, Leavis acted as one of the chief
exponents of ethical criticism. As a major critical voice — perhaps the major
twentieth century British critical voice, as evidence by his seminal essays published
in Scrutiny in the 1930s and 1940s — Leavis influenced generations of thinkers
as they pondered literature’s moral value systems. In works such as The Great
Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (1948), Leavis directed
literary critics in the United Kingdom and the United States alike to engage the
scholarly energies in addressing the ethical properties of the novel as our most
revelatory generic long-playing form. Leavis’s successors eagerly take up this
baton, as demonstrated by the work of British critic Christopher Norris, who
argues in Truth and the Ethics of Criticism (1994) that by providing readers with
the means to establish vital interconnections between texts and the divergent,
heterogeneous communities in which we live, ethical criticism attempts to empower
the theoretical project with the capacity to produce socially and culturally relevant
critiques. This way of reading allows critics to consider “the prospect of a better,
more enlightened alternative where the difference within each and every subject
is envisaged as providing the common ground, the measure of shared humanity,
whereby to transcend such differences between ethnic and national ties” (94). As
Kenneth Womack observes, Norris consequently “posits an ethics of criticism that
self-consciously assesses the theoretical presuppositions undergirding the moral
position of,” for instance,“contemporary hermeneutics” (Womack 168).
Not surprisingly, such grandiose social and critical arguments are
conspicuously absent from the work of American critic Martha C. Nussbaum,
whose Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990) and
other work represent the high tide of pragmatic and rhetorical ethics. As with the
eminent American rhetorician Wayne C. Booth in The Company We Keep: An
Ethics of Fiction(1988), Nussbaum focuses largely on the novel as a means for
ethical reflection. In particular, Nussbaum applies her Boothian conception of
ethical criticism to the work of Henry James, Marcel Proust,and dramatist Samuel
Beckett. Nussbaumfervently defends the practice of ethical criticism, arguing that
certain literary works may potentially play important supplementary roles in moral
education and applyingthis notion to James’s novels, which she sees and key sites
of ethical interplay and valuation.
In Love’s Knowledge, Nussbaum demonstrates the interpretive power of
ethical criticism, the usefulness of its critical goals to scholarship concerning
literary character upon the cultural landscape of fiction, and the ethical motivations
underpinning satire. She argues, moreover, for the place of love as a subject in
the evolving discourse of ethical criticism. In particular, Nussbaum is concerned
with “practical love,” referring to “an attitude of concern that one can will oneself
to have towards another human being, and which is, for that reason, a part of
morality” as opposed to “pathological” (336-37) or irrational obsessive love.
The acknowledgment of practical love provides additional insight into human
conceptions of living well and the ways in which literary texts depict love’s
capacity to produce personal fulfillment. In a later work, Poetic Justice (1995),
Nussbaum takes her theoretical perspective a step further and explores the value of
ethical reading as a means of influencing political theory and public discourse.
To understand the late-twentieth-century American academy’s grappling with
ethical theory, it is vital that we consider the role of stylistics in ethical criticism.
In Love’s Knowledge, Nussbaum writes that “Form and style are not incidental
features. A view of life is told. The telling itself — the selection of genre, formal
structures, sentences, vocabulary, of the whole manner of addressing the reader’s
sense of life — all of this expresses a sense of life and of value, a sense of what
matters and what does not, of what learning and communicating are, of life’s
relationships and connections. Life is never simply presented by a text; it is always
represented as something” (5). In the light of such an observation from a leading
exponent of “ethical criticism,” it is little wonder that the novel maintains its
preeminence as afavored form of exploration.
To understand the philosophical origins of Booth and Nussbaum’s scholarship,
it is especially useful to consider the work of their key influences — namely, such
thinkers as Louise M. Rosenblatt, John Gardner, J. Hillis Miller, and Bernard
Williams, among others. In The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional
Theory of the Literary Work (1978), Rosenblatt provides a matrix of interpretation
for ethical critics to explain reader’s motives and their “transactions” with literary
texts. According to Rosenblatt, there are two principal types of reading strategies:
1. Aesthetic reading in which the reader is concerned with what occurs whilst
actually reading;
2. Non-aesthetic reading in which the reader is concerned with what occurs
after reading.
The non-aesthetic is a notably different kind of reading;it is interested with what
the reader materially derives from the reading experience — for instance, a
concern with verbal symbols, what they represent, and so forth. The reader “seeks
the information, the concepts, theguides to action that will be left with the reader
when the reading is over” (27). Such a position offers vastly similar aims as those
most closely associated withreader-response criticism.2During the act of reading,
Rosenblatt writes,“each reader brings to the transaction, not only a specific past
life and literary history, not only a repertory of internalized ‘codes’ but also a very
active present, with all its preoccupations, anxieties, questions and aspirations”
(144). Indeed, for Rosenblatt reading is a complex transaction that involves a deep
interconnection between reader and the human communities in which they live and
seek personal fulfillment. The reading transaction lays “bare the assumption about
human beings and society and the hierarchy of values that govern the world derived
from the text” (149-50).
In 1978, Gardner published On Moral Fiction, taking Rosenblatt’s theories
a step further and arguing that artistic expression “is not didactic because… it
clarifies, like an experiment in a chemistry lab, and confirms” (19). Consequently,
Gardner affirms that power of reading andexpresses the text’s ability to convey
ideas and notions concerning knowledge and universal good for its readers, through
for instance allegory, satire,or other fictive devices. Our ethical continuum further
evolves with the work of British philosopher Bernard Williams, who argues in
Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985) that “an ethical theory is a theoretical
account of what ethical thought and practice are” (72).Williams’s position “either
implies a general test for the correctness of basic ethical beliefs and principles or
else implies that there cannot be such a test” (72).In particular, Williams raises the
issue of the motives of critics who engage in the interpretation of human values. In
concert with his critical forebears, Williams takes great pains toavoid what he sees
as the self-propagation of personal values imposed upon a literary work.He writes
that “we should not try to seal determinate values into the future society,” warning
that “to try to transmit free inquiry and the reflective consciousness is to transmit
something more than nothing, and something that demands some forms of life more
rather than others” (173).
In its basic manifestations, ethical criticism attempts to communicate the
meaning of Williams’s “something” and its greater social relevance through the
interpretation of literary works. And, as previously noted, these works are, with
the exception of Rosenblatt’s attention to poetry, largely works of fiction. In The
Company We Keep, Booth observes that “ethical criticism attempts to describe the
encounters of a storyteller’s ethos with that of the reader or listener. Ethical critics
need not begin with the intent to evaluate, but their descriptions will always entail
appraisals of the value of what is being described” (8). Simply put, Booth’s ethical
criticism allows for the recognition of the interrelatedness of the reading experience
andthe life of the reader. Booth recognizes the powerful factors of language and
ideology when texts are assessed. By this reasoning, feminist criticism may be
regarded as a type of ethical criticism through a form of literary interpretation
that seeks to draw attention to perceived social injustice such as misogyny or the
underrepresentation of women.
In Getting It Right (1992), Harpham continues Booth and Nussbaum’s efforts
to elaborate the ethical paradigm as an interdisciplinary means of interpretation.
Ethical criticism should “be considered a matrix, a hub from which the various
discourses and disciplines fan out and at which they meet, crossing out of
themselves to encounter each other” (17). Harpham draws upon the term “ethicity”
to refer to the interpretive moments in ethical criticism: “the most dramatic of
narrative turnings, the climactic point just between the knitting and unraveling of
the action, the fort and the da, the moments when the rising line of complication
peaks, pauses, and begins its descent into the dénouement.” For Harpham, this
line of thinking refers to a “macro-turn” in which ethical critics, through their
obligations to their own sets of values and commitments, reflect upon and interpret
the moral choices depicted in narratives (171).
Our tour of Western critical thought vis-à-vis ethical criticism concludes with
Miller, a poststructuralist juggernaut in his own right whose important volume, The
Ethics of Reading (1989) concerns the process that occurs between the text and
the reader. For Miller, this is a reflexive process in which the reading experience is
shifting, is performative. In his later work Versions of Pygmalion (1990), he argues
that reading defies stasis, that reading evolves during successive readings of a given
text. More recently, Miller’s Reading for Our Time: Adam Bede and Middlemarch
Revisited (2012) revisits the issue of reading as a means for understanding the
present. Miller pointedly asks, “Can reading Adam Bede and Middlemarch
be justified in this time of climate change, financial meltdown and ineffective
politicians?” (1). By paying attention to each work’s linguistic detail, to its figures
of speech, and by relating characters and their sociocultural errors in these works to
current affairs, Miller conspicuously interprets literary works in the context of the
here and the now. Reading — or rereading according to Miller — may assist us in
accommodating the current human, social, and political situations of our times and,
if we succeed in putting discourse into action, perhaps even ameliorating them.
It is worth noting that much of Anglo-American ethical criticism belongs to
the late twentieth century, a period of reaction, largely in American universities,to
the specters of deconstruction, poststructuralism, and the emerging influence of
continental philosophy, the interpretive power of which we will address in the
reading of Ford Madox Ford’s novel below. In many ways, ethical criticism has
fallen short of realizing the vision inherent in Booth’s The Company We Keep “of
a reading methodology that shuns theoretical dogma in favor of ‘critical pluralism’
and highlights the ethical interconnections between the lives of readers and their
textual experiences” (Booth 489). If anything, the twenty-first century has seen
a clear movement away from Anglo-American ethical criticism to the Eastern
academy — namely, China’s burgeoning critical project — where the paradigm’s
chief expositors now ply their trade. This notion is most principally demonstrated
by the work of Zhenzhao Nie, who draws attention to the most recent developments
in ethical criticism in China and providevital new perspectives about its potential
reinvigoration. Indeed, as Shang reveals, there are, with some exceptions, three
main thrusts of ethical criticism:
1. pragmatic and rhetorical ethics as expounded by Nussbaum, Booth and
others;
2. the ethics of alterity — of difference, of otherness as expounded by
French theorists regarding the work of Derrida, Levinas, and Miller;
3. political approaches to ethics, with the main exponents being such
luminaries as Homi K. Bhabha and Luce Irigaray.
Yet as Shang indicates, these three principal strands did not develop into a fully
independent discipline or an individual critical school devoted, in specific, to
ethical study. In China, the refinements of ethical criticism may be found in the
sophisticated work Nie and Shang, two critics whose evolving discourse point to
a renaissance in the ethical project as a matrix of critical interpretation. Chinese
theorists such as Nie and Shang clearly realize, as with their Anglo-American
precursors, the significance of understanding our moral interrelationships with
imaginative works of literature. As the eminent British dramatist Tom Stoppard
recently observed, our shared international literatures possess a unique power to
move us towards vital moments of ethical reflection that can prompt us into muchneed,
even life-affirming and culture-shifting action. As Stoppard remarked —
speaking in particular about theatre’s signal role in contemporary life — our desire
for spectacle “fulfills one of the prime functions of art in society, namely to reflect
and interpret and offer a critique of the social environment it lives in” (Stoppard).
With such a mandate still in the offing for a world beset by challenge and crisis, can
the fundamental need for an ethical criticism ever truly lose its sway?
Alterity and the Ethics of Place in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End
As our historical study of the ethical project reveals, as an interpretive paradigm,
ethical criticism offers a valuable lens for examining the manner in which literary
characters experience moments of moral clarity and interpersonal change.
Originally published in 1924-1928, Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End illustrates
a variety of ethical principles inherent in the evolving critical vocabulary of
continental philosophy’s postwar ethical turn. In Parade’s End, Ford deftly
explores the nuances of literary realism, while simultaneously experimenting
with the technique of Impressionist “rendering” that he had contemplated with
great frequency in his nonfiction. Ford imagined writing a novel “on an immense
scale, a little cloudy in immediate attack, but with the salient points and the final
impression extraordinarily clear. I wanted the Novelist in fact to appear in his really
proud position as historian of his own time.... The ‘subject,’” Ford added, “was
the world as it culminated in the war” (qtd. in Bradbury xvii). Ford’s conception
of Impressionism affords Parade’s End with its precise formal structure, as well as
with its significant ethical agenda. In addition to its historiographic components,
Parade’s End addresses a range of issues regarding the moral crises following
the Great War and the conflict’s substantial influence upon the abidingly complex
interrelationship between French and British culture and society.
Originally published as four novels — Some Do Not..., No More Parades,
A Man Could Stand Up —, and Last Post — Parade’s End traces the war- and
peace-time experiences of Christopher Tietjens; in this manner, Ford’s tetralogy
encounters a number of revealing aspects of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophies
of the self, alterity, and otherness. As Jill Robbins observes in Altered Reading:
Levinas and Literature (1999), Levinasian ethics “denotes the putting into question
of the self by the infinitizing mode of the face of the other” (xiii). Ford’s ethical
imperatives in Parade’s End are most dramatically underscored by Marie Léonie’s
powerful interior monologue, which shrewdly establishes the French point-of-view
regarding the staggering social and cultural atrocities of the First World War. Her
dramatic meditation — perhaps more than any other moment in Ford’s tetralogy —
genuinely reveals the complex “face” of England’s French “other.”
In Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas (1998), Robert Eaglestone
argues that “Levinas’s thought cannot be turned into a methodology: it is not a
philosophy that can be applied.... To ask for a Levinasian critical method is to
ask for something that cannot and should not exist” (176; italics added). In fact,
Eaglestone offers little evidence demonstrating the thrust of his contention beyond
his observation that “there is obviously no one critical process which embodies
Levinas’s ideas, no one answer” (176). Yet Levinas’s ethical philosophy quite
obviously posits its own terminology — including such concepts as “adequation,”
“alterity,” “the face,” and “negation,” among a host of others. Simply put,
Levinasian philosophy, despite Eaglestone’s misgivings, can easily be applied as
an interpretive matrix in much the same interdisciplinary fashion as gender studies,
psychology, history, and sociology — to name but a few of literary criticism’s
multitudinous allied disciplines, each of which possesses its own contingent of
thinkers with their own critical vocabularies.
Such philosophically vexed issues as obligation and responsibility, for
instance, are perhaps most usefully considered via Levinas’s conceptions of alterity,
contemporary moral philosophy’s sine qua non for understanding the nature of
our innate responsibilities to our human others. In “Is Ontology Fundamental?”
Levinas discusses the ethical significance of other beings in relation to the needs
and desires of ourselves. Our ethical obligations to others, Levinas reasons, find
their origins in our inability to erase them via negation. Simply put, unless we
succeed in negating others through violence, domination, or slavery, we must
comprehend others as beings par excellence who become signified as “faces,” the
Levinasian term that refers to the moral consciousness and particularity inherent
in others. This “primacy of ontology,” in Levinas’s words, demonstrates the nature
of the collective interrelationships that human beings share with one another (10).
In “The Trace of the Other,” Levinas argues that “the relationship with the other
puts me into question, empties me of myself” (350). More importantly for our
purposes here, Levinas describes the concept of the face as “the concrete figure for
alterity” (qtd. in Robbins 23). The notion of alterity itself — which Paul-Laurent
Assoun characterizes as “the primal scene of ethics” (96) — refers to our inherent
responsibilities and obligations to the irreducible face of the other. These aspects
of our human condition find their origins in the recognition of sameness that
we find in others. This similarity of identity and human empathy establishes the
foundation for our alterity — in short, the possibility of being “altered” — and for
the responsibilities and obligations that we afford to other beings.
In Time and the Other (1979), Levinas identifies the absolute exteriority
of alterity, as opposed to the binary, dialectic, or reciprocal structure implied
in the idea of the other. Hence, alterity implies a state of being apprehended, a
state of infinite and absolute otherness. In “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,”
Levinas writes that “we can say that the alterity of the infinite is not canceled, is
not extinguished in the thought that thinks it. In thinking infinity the I from the
first thinks more than it thinks. Infinity does not enter into the idea of infinity, is
not grasped; this idea is not a concept,” he continues，“The infinite is radically,
absolutely, other” (54). Alterity’s boundless possibilities for registering otherness,
for allowing us to comprehend the experiences of other beings, demonstrates its
ethical imperatives. Its exteriority forces us to recognize an ethics of difference
and of otherness. Such encounters with other beings oblige us, then, to incur the
spheres of responsibility inherent in our alterity. When we perceive the face of the
other, we can no longer, at least ethically, suspend responsibility for other beings.
In such instances, Levinas writes in “Meaning and Sense,” “the I loses its sovereign
self-confidence, its identification, in which consciousness returns triumphantly to
itself to rest on itself. Before the exigency of the Other (Autrui), the I is expelled
from this rest and is not the already glorious consciousness of this exile. Any
complacency,” he adds, “would destroy the straightforwardness of the ethical
movement” (54).
Drawing upon Levinas’s critical matrix of alterity, a reading of Ford’s ethical
imperatives in Parade’s End demonstrates the author’s considerable humanistic
agenda for “altering” our perspectives of war and atrocity via his well-honed
Impressionistic techniques. In his landmark essay, “On Impressionism,” Ford
describes his conception of Impressionism in terms of its capacity for impacting
— and, indeed, ultimately altering — readerly perspectives: “Always consider
the impressions that you are making upon the mind of the reader,” he writes, “and
always consider that the first impression with which you present him will be so
strong that it will be all that you can ever do to efface it, to alter it or even quite
slightly to modify it” (39). In Ford’s postulation, the Impressionist technique
affords novelists with the ability to capture the nuances of genuine humanity that
mark our lives and to ponder the occasional moments in which we reveal the
nature of our inner selves: “I suppose that Impressionism exists to render those
queer effects of real life that are like so many views seen through bright glass,”
Ford observes, “through glass so bright that whilst you perceive through it a
landscape or a backyard, you are aware that, on its surface, it reflects a face of a
person behind you. For the whole of life is really like that,” Ford adds, and “we are
almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite other” (41). Ford’s
Impressionistic technique involves the careful construction of a series of layers of
meaning that work in concert in order to evoke various images and emotions. As
Max Saunders notes, “Ford responds to the complexity of war-torn Europe not by
impressing his own designs upon his material, but by rendering the complexity. His
fiction does not work to subordinate everything to his voice,” Saunders continues，
“It re-creates the play of conflicting voices, volitions, attitudes, and viewpoints”
(211). Simply put, through his assembly of details and revelations in his novels
concerning the lives and proclivities of his characters, Ford attempts “to produce an
illusion of reality” in the mind of the reader (44).
This notion of an “illusion of reality” allows Ford to shape the ethical
perspectives inherent in such narratives as The Good Soldier (1915) and Parade’s
End. In Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society (1999), Harpham
observes that “ethics does not solve problems, it structures them” (37). In
Parade’s End, Ford structures his novel’s ethical dimensions by imagining a vast
Impressionistic expanse regarding the Great War and its sociocultural aftermath.
Perhaps even more effectively than with his depiction of the bewildered (and
bewildering) John Dowell in his masterwork of narratology and concentration,
The Good Soldier, Ford’s tetralogy succeeds in portraying the ways in which
conscious minds engage in the act of perception and, in some cases, wallow in
sheer ignorance. In Parade’s End, the novel itself concerns the collapse of Tory-
Christian values after the First World War. A central text in the modernist canon
of the 1920s, Parade’s End functions as a kind of “crisis epic” or “anti-epic,” in
the words of Malcolm Bradbury, that “deals with peace and war, society as it has
formed itself in the belle époque era, and society as it is shattered by war” (xvi).
The tetralogy’s protagonist Christopher Tietjens — the “last Tory” — witnesses
the violence and social hypocrisy of postwar Europe, while also pondering the end
of a cultural and political epoch in England. Although much of the novel involves
Tietjens’s perspectives of war and its aftermath, Parade’s End devotes considerable
attention to his protracted bout of sexual warfare with his adulterous wife Sylvia,
who confronts him with yet other social paradigm shifts of a sort in the guises of
polygamy, divorce, and the New Woman. Perhaps even more interestingly, though,
is the manner in which Ford’s novel recontextualizes French war- and peace-time
experiences for its largely English-speaking audience.
Of particular interest to this essay, then, is Marie Léonie’s powerful —
and, for some critics at least, controversial — interior monologue that features
prominently, and some argue disconcertingly, in the tetralogy’s final installment,
Last Post. Ancillary to much of Parade’s End’s narrative, Marie Léonie’s inclusion
as a central character in Last Post surely presented Ford with considerable textual
difficulties. As Arthur Mizener writes: “Ford exercised all his ingenuity to justify
his abrupt introduction of her, but there is no getting around the fact that, in using
her, he multiplied entities unnecessarily and shifted attention from the real center
of the action; though it is easy to understand why, with his lifelong passion for
the French, Ford found her irresistible” (508). The genesis of her name offers an
intriguing antecedent in itself. As with Ford’s contemporary, Princess Marie-Léonie
Bonaparte (1870-1947) — herself the distant inheritor of a vanquished regime —
Ford’s French heroine in Last Post finds herself on the precipice of a new world
order that dares to redraw the boundaries of the sociocultural relationship between
England and France. In Last Post, Marie Léonie shares a North Country cottage
with her dying lover, Christopher’s older brother Mark, as well as with Christopher
and his mistress Valentine. Marie Léonie’s efforts at nursing Mark back to health
after his stroke will come to no avail. Thematically, a dying Tory like him simply
cannot survive in the new world. Similarly, Christopher and Valentine will not be
able to hide in the provinces from Sylvia forever; eventually, the bold and brazen
twentieth century — embodied in the figure of Sylvia herself, no less — will
descend upon them in the cottage, and their perceptions of, and places within, the
post-Armistice world will become altered irrevocably.
For this reason, Ford uses Marie Léonie’s interior narrative as the means via
which he registers his principal characters’ displacement in the postwar world. Her
monologues in Last Post provide Ford’s English readership with the opportunity for
distinguishing the Levinasian “face” of their hitherto concealed French other. Ford
accomplishes this end by allowing Marie Léonie to reveal her particularity and her
continental perspectives throughout her interior narrative. Ford describes her as
being of “the large, blond, Norman type; in the middle forties, her extremely fair
hair very voluminous and noticeable. She had lived with Mark Tietjens for twenty
years now,” Ford adds, “but she had always refused to speak a word of English,
having an invincible scorn for both language and people of her adopted country”
(737). Marie Léonie’s existence within the close environs of her adopted English
family forces them to recognize her alien presence, to confront a very different
perspective of the Great War and its outcome. For Mark, Ford writes, “No doubt
twenty years of listening to the almost ceaseless but never disagreeable Marie
Léonie had been a liberal education” (785). Perhaps even more importantly, though,
her interrelationship with the Tietjens family forces them, and especially Mark, to
reconceive the First World War and the resulting balance of power in Europe from
a markedly different vantage point. On Armistice Day, English buglers solemnly
“played the Last Post on the steps of the church under Marie Léonie’s windows”
(787). Rather than being consumed with nostalgia for the England of days gone by
or relieved by the nation’s recent withdrawal from war-time Europe, Marie Léonie
can only think of the numerous French dead and the needless waste of a generation.
For her, the bugle’s dirge — “a funeral call at three in the morning” — is an affront:
“It was betraying her country to have given those [German] assassins an armistice
when they were far from their borders,” Ford writes,“Merely that was treachery on
the part of these sham Allies. They should have gone right through those monsters
slaying them by the millions, defenseless, and then they should have laid waste
their country with fire and sword. Let them too know what it was to suffer as
France had suffered” (838).
As the tetralogy—and, hence, the end of his own life — comes to its
conclusion, Mark finally and rather pointedly perceives Marie Léonie’s otherness
through his altered relationship with her in specific and with France in general.
Mark’s “long association with Marie Léonie, his respect for the way in which she
had her head screwed on, the constant intimacy with the life and point of view
of French individuals of the petite bourgeoisie which her gossip had given him
— all these things together with his despair for the future of his own country had
given him a very considerable belief in the destinies and indeed in the virtues of
the country across the Channel,” Ford writes (806). By demonstrating his English
characters, and especially Mark, in the act of reconsidering their interrelationship
with France through the auspices of Marie Léonie’s particularity, Ford underscores
the value and significance inherent in our ethical obligations to others. Ford’s
Impressionism — his “illusion of reality” — merely functions as the engine of
Parade’s End’s ethics of alterity. The rest is up to us.
Notes
1. We owe this observation to the distinguished Russian literary critic Igor Olegovich Shaytanov’s
prescient remarks during the 4th International Symposium on Ethical Literary Criticism held at
Shanghai Jiao Tong University in December 2014.
2. Rosenblatt’s contributions to reader‑response criticism receive special attention in Terence R.
Wright’s review‑essay, “Reader‑Response under Review: Art, Game, or Science?” The value of
Rosenblatt’s transactional theory of reading, Wright argues, “lies in its recognition of both sides
of the ‘reading transaction,’ reader and text” (542).
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Altoona College, Pennsylvania State University
Penn State Altoona, 3000 Ivyside Park, Altoona, PA 16601
Email: [email protected]
Abstract Questions about ethics continue to exert a profound influence upon the
direction of contemporary literary criticism. In addition to tracing the evolution
of ethical criticism as an interpretive form, this essay explores the ways in which
the critical paradigm’s twenty-first-century manifestations continue to address
literature’s ethical motivations and import. As a form of case-study, this essay
examines Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End both in terms of the ethical framework
in which the novel’s characters coexist as well as the moral crises following the
Great War and the conflict’s substantial influence upon the abidingly complex
interrelationship between French and British culture and society. Through this
lens, we can understand the manner in which Ford’s tetralogy encounters a number
of revealing aspects of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophies of the self, alterity,
and otherness. Drawing upon Levinas’s critical matrix of alterity, a reading of
Ford’s ethical imperatives in Parade’s End demonstrates the author’s considerable
humanistic agenda for “altering” our perspectives of war and atrocity via his wellhoned
and influential Impressionistic techniques.
Keywords Ethical criticism; Ford, Ford Madox; Impressionism; Levinas,
Emmanuel; Moral philosophy; Selfhood
Authors Kenneth Womack is Professor of English and Integrative Arts at Penn
State Altoona, where he also serves as Senior Associate Dean for Academic
Affairs. He is the author of three award-winning novels — John Doe No. 2 and
the Dreamland Motel (2010), The Restaurant at the End of the World (2012),
and Playing the Angel (2013). Womack is also the author or editor of numerous
works of nonfiction, including Long and Winding Roads: The Evolving Artistry of
the Beatles (2007) and The Beatles Encyclopedia, Everything Fab Four (2014);
William Baker is Distinguished Research Professor of English, Northern Illinois
University.
A Brief History of Anglo-American Literature and Ethical Criticism
Questions about ethics continue to exert a profound influence upon the direction
of contemporary literary criticism. Yet, as Geoffrey Galt Harpham observes in
Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society, ethical criticism functions
in the eyes of many literary scholars as an “alien discourse” that challenges or
undermines the theoretical project’s capacity for promoting “literature’s immediacy,
concreteness, vitality, and affective richness” (ix). During the last two decades,
ethical criticism’s fusion with continental philosophy has produced a more
theoretically rigorous form of literary critique that continues to elevate its status as
a viable interpretive mechanism. In contrast with North American variations of the
paradigm that find their origins in Kantian moral philosophy and troll dangerously
close to the shoals of moral relativism, ethical criticism’s European manifestations
offer a more forceful analysis by emphasizing continental philosophy’s various and
ongoing accounts of alterity, otherness, and phenomenology. While both schools of
thought may hale from decidedly different venues of intellectual thought, ethical
criticism’s various manifestations demonstrate the theoretical project’s larger
interest in assessing the value systems that inform our textual interpretations.
As recent evidence has shown, ethical criticism’s Anglo-American emergence
during the latter half of the twentieth century is enjoying yet another renaissance,
particularly in the Eastern academy—namely, China—as thinkers in the new
century ponder the significance of addressing literature’s ethical motivations and
import.
To begin, ethical criticism can be most usefully understood through two
principal spheres of thought:
1. as an “interpretive paradigm that explores the nature of ethical issues from
their considerable roles in the creation and interpretation of literary works”
(Womack 167);
2. as a philosophical matrix that “refers to the inclusion of ethical components
in the interpretation and evaluation of art” ( Peek).
Moreover, ethical criticism may be regarded as a meeting between the two
polarities of moralism, which contends that the aesthetic value of art should be
determined by or reduced to its “moral” value, and autonomism, which challenges
our notions about whether it is appropriate to apply moral categories to art that
should be evaluated by aesthetic standards alone.
Among Anglo-American academic circles, it must be understood that there are
signal differences between British and American manifestations of ethical criticism.
The revival of ethical criticism as an interpretative paradigm during the last two
decades of the twentieth century finds its origins as a response, especially in the mid
to late 1980s, to poststructuralist theoretical concerns such as deconstruction and
the development of postmodernism as a set of theoretical positions. Many of these
theoretical thrusts had their origins in post-Second World War French philosophical
thought influenced by earlier German thinkers such as Husserl, Heidegger, and
others (see Abrams and Harpham 56). French philosophical thought — as espoused,
for instance, by leading players such as Derrida — exerteda powerful impact
upon American academe, especially in the form of key professorial appointments
during the early 1980s in prestigious East Coast institutions. The ensuing reactions
subsequently led to the development of various socially challenging modes of
critical thinking — for example, gender studies, historical criticism, anti-theory,
and eco-criticism, among others.
As one of the critical zeitgeist’s key late-twentieth-century movements,
ethical criticism may be regarded as a sociocultural reaction toa host of critical
and philosophical antecedents.In literary studies, we can find these roots in
much earlier works, such as Tolstoy’s classic “What Is Art?”and Oscar Wilde’s
Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray in which he asserts that moral merits and
defects should not influence aesthetic considerations.Other examples of earlier
exponents of ethical criticism may be found also in the work of the great Russian
critics Alexander Voronski and Mikhail Bakhtin, whose literary criticism can be
understood as essentially “ethical” in nature.1 Contextually, ethical criticism and
other interpretive forms find their origins in the Anglo-American academy and in
the institutionalization of English studies and literary theory, particularly in the
United States. In Europe, on the other hand — and namely in France and Germany
— there has been a striking tendency to examine ethical aesthetics in terms of
their philosophical implications rather than, as in the United Kingdom, from the
perspective of cultural studies.
Scholars in British academic circles have explored ethical literary
considerations since the early twentieth century, as evinced by F. R. Leavis
and Christopher Norris, among others. Indeed, Leavis acted as one of the chief
exponents of ethical criticism. As a major critical voice — perhaps the major
twentieth century British critical voice, as evidence by his seminal essays published
in Scrutiny in the 1930s and 1940s — Leavis influenced generations of thinkers
as they pondered literature’s moral value systems. In works such as The Great
Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (1948), Leavis directed
literary critics in the United Kingdom and the United States alike to engage the
scholarly energies in addressing the ethical properties of the novel as our most
revelatory generic long-playing form. Leavis’s successors eagerly take up this
baton, as demonstrated by the work of British critic Christopher Norris, who
argues in Truth and the Ethics of Criticism (1994) that by providing readers with
the means to establish vital interconnections between texts and the divergent,
heterogeneous communities in which we live, ethical criticism attempts to empower
the theoretical project with the capacity to produce socially and culturally relevant
critiques. This way of reading allows critics to consider “the prospect of a better,
more enlightened alternative where the difference within each and every subject
is envisaged as providing the common ground, the measure of shared humanity,
whereby to transcend such differences between ethnic and national ties” (94). As
Kenneth Womack observes, Norris consequently “posits an ethics of criticism that
self-consciously assesses the theoretical presuppositions undergirding the moral
position of,” for instance,“contemporary hermeneutics” (Womack 168).
Not surprisingly, such grandiose social and critical arguments are
conspicuously absent from the work of American critic Martha C. Nussbaum,
whose Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990) and
other work represent the high tide of pragmatic and rhetorical ethics. As with the
eminent American rhetorician Wayne C. Booth in The Company We Keep: An
Ethics of Fiction(1988), Nussbaum focuses largely on the novel as a means for
ethical reflection. In particular, Nussbaum applies her Boothian conception of
ethical criticism to the work of Henry James, Marcel Proust,and dramatist Samuel
Beckett. Nussbaumfervently defends the practice of ethical criticism, arguing that
certain literary works may potentially play important supplementary roles in moral
education and applyingthis notion to James’s novels, which she sees and key sites
of ethical interplay and valuation.
In Love’s Knowledge, Nussbaum demonstrates the interpretive power of
ethical criticism, the usefulness of its critical goals to scholarship concerning
literary character upon the cultural landscape of fiction, and the ethical motivations
underpinning satire. She argues, moreover, for the place of love as a subject in
the evolving discourse of ethical criticism. In particular, Nussbaum is concerned
with “practical love,” referring to “an attitude of concern that one can will oneself
to have towards another human being, and which is, for that reason, a part of
morality” as opposed to “pathological” (336-37) or irrational obsessive love.
The acknowledgment of practical love provides additional insight into human
conceptions of living well and the ways in which literary texts depict love’s
capacity to produce personal fulfillment. In a later work, Poetic Justice (1995),
Nussbaum takes her theoretical perspective a step further and explores the value of
ethical reading as a means of influencing political theory and public discourse.
To understand the late-twentieth-century American academy’s grappling with
ethical theory, it is vital that we consider the role of stylistics in ethical criticism.
In Love’s Knowledge, Nussbaum writes that “Form and style are not incidental
features. A view of life is told. The telling itself — the selection of genre, formal
structures, sentences, vocabulary, of the whole manner of addressing the reader’s
sense of life — all of this expresses a sense of life and of value, a sense of what
matters and what does not, of what learning and communicating are, of life’s
relationships and connections. Life is never simply presented by a text; it is always
represented as something” (5). In the light of such an observation from a leading
exponent of “ethical criticism,” it is little wonder that the novel maintains its
preeminence as afavored form of exploration.
To understand the philosophical origins of Booth and Nussbaum’s scholarship,
it is especially useful to consider the work of their key influences — namely, such
thinkers as Louise M. Rosenblatt, John Gardner, J. Hillis Miller, and Bernard
Williams, among others. In The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional
Theory of the Literary Work (1978), Rosenblatt provides a matrix of interpretation
for ethical critics to explain reader’s motives and their “transactions” with literary
texts. According to Rosenblatt, there are two principal types of reading strategies:
1. Aesthetic reading in which the reader is concerned with what occurs whilst
actually reading;
2. Non-aesthetic reading in which the reader is concerned with what occurs
after reading.
The non-aesthetic is a notably different kind of reading;it is interested with what
the reader materially derives from the reading experience — for instance, a
concern with verbal symbols, what they represent, and so forth. The reader “seeks
the information, the concepts, theguides to action that will be left with the reader
when the reading is over” (27). Such a position offers vastly similar aims as those
most closely associated withreader-response criticism.2During the act of reading,
Rosenblatt writes,“each reader brings to the transaction, not only a specific past
life and literary history, not only a repertory of internalized ‘codes’ but also a very
active present, with all its preoccupations, anxieties, questions and aspirations”
(144). Indeed, for Rosenblatt reading is a complex transaction that involves a deep
interconnection between reader and the human communities in which they live and
seek personal fulfillment. The reading transaction lays “bare the assumption about
human beings and society and the hierarchy of values that govern the world derived
from the text” (149-50).
In 1978, Gardner published On Moral Fiction, taking Rosenblatt’s theories
a step further and arguing that artistic expression “is not didactic because… it
clarifies, like an experiment in a chemistry lab, and confirms” (19). Consequently,
Gardner affirms that power of reading andexpresses the text’s ability to convey
ideas and notions concerning knowledge and universal good for its readers, through
for instance allegory, satire,or other fictive devices. Our ethical continuum further
evolves with the work of British philosopher Bernard Williams, who argues in
Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985) that “an ethical theory is a theoretical
account of what ethical thought and practice are” (72).Williams’s position “either
implies a general test for the correctness of basic ethical beliefs and principles or
else implies that there cannot be such a test” (72).In particular, Williams raises the
issue of the motives of critics who engage in the interpretation of human values. In
concert with his critical forebears, Williams takes great pains toavoid what he sees
as the self-propagation of personal values imposed upon a literary work.He writes
that “we should not try to seal determinate values into the future society,” warning
that “to try to transmit free inquiry and the reflective consciousness is to transmit
something more than nothing, and something that demands some forms of life more
rather than others” (173).
In its basic manifestations, ethical criticism attempts to communicate the
meaning of Williams’s “something” and its greater social relevance through the
interpretation of literary works. And, as previously noted, these works are, with
the exception of Rosenblatt’s attention to poetry, largely works of fiction. In The
Company We Keep, Booth observes that “ethical criticism attempts to describe the
encounters of a storyteller’s ethos with that of the reader or listener. Ethical critics
need not begin with the intent to evaluate, but their descriptions will always entail
appraisals of the value of what is being described” (8). Simply put, Booth’s ethical
criticism allows for the recognition of the interrelatedness of the reading experience
andthe life of the reader. Booth recognizes the powerful factors of language and
ideology when texts are assessed. By this reasoning, feminist criticism may be
regarded as a type of ethical criticism through a form of literary interpretation
that seeks to draw attention to perceived social injustice such as misogyny or the
underrepresentation of women.
In Getting It Right (1992), Harpham continues Booth and Nussbaum’s efforts
to elaborate the ethical paradigm as an interdisciplinary means of interpretation.
Ethical criticism should “be considered a matrix, a hub from which the various
discourses and disciplines fan out and at which they meet, crossing out of
themselves to encounter each other” (17). Harpham draws upon the term “ethicity”
to refer to the interpretive moments in ethical criticism: “the most dramatic of
narrative turnings, the climactic point just between the knitting and unraveling of
the action, the fort and the da, the moments when the rising line of complication
peaks, pauses, and begins its descent into the dénouement.” For Harpham, this
line of thinking refers to a “macro-turn” in which ethical critics, through their
obligations to their own sets of values and commitments, reflect upon and interpret
the moral choices depicted in narratives (171).
Our tour of Western critical thought vis-à-vis ethical criticism concludes with
Miller, a poststructuralist juggernaut in his own right whose important volume, The
Ethics of Reading (1989) concerns the process that occurs between the text and
the reader. For Miller, this is a reflexive process in which the reading experience is
shifting, is performative. In his later work Versions of Pygmalion (1990), he argues
that reading defies stasis, that reading evolves during successive readings of a given
text. More recently, Miller’s Reading for Our Time: Adam Bede and Middlemarch
Revisited (2012) revisits the issue of reading as a means for understanding the
present. Miller pointedly asks, “Can reading Adam Bede and Middlemarch
be justified in this time of climate change, financial meltdown and ineffective
politicians?” (1). By paying attention to each work’s linguistic detail, to its figures
of speech, and by relating characters and their sociocultural errors in these works to
current affairs, Miller conspicuously interprets literary works in the context of the
here and the now. Reading — or rereading according to Miller — may assist us in
accommodating the current human, social, and political situations of our times and,
if we succeed in putting discourse into action, perhaps even ameliorating them.
It is worth noting that much of Anglo-American ethical criticism belongs to
the late twentieth century, a period of reaction, largely in American universities,to
the specters of deconstruction, poststructuralism, and the emerging influence of
continental philosophy, the interpretive power of which we will address in the
reading of Ford Madox Ford’s novel below. In many ways, ethical criticism has
fallen short of realizing the vision inherent in Booth’s The Company We Keep “of
a reading methodology that shuns theoretical dogma in favor of ‘critical pluralism’
and highlights the ethical interconnections between the lives of readers and their
textual experiences” (Booth 489). If anything, the twenty-first century has seen
a clear movement away from Anglo-American ethical criticism to the Eastern
academy — namely, China’s burgeoning critical project — where the paradigm’s
chief expositors now ply their trade. This notion is most principally demonstrated
by the work of Zhenzhao Nie, who draws attention to the most recent developments
in ethical criticism in China and providevital new perspectives about its potential
reinvigoration. Indeed, as Shang reveals, there are, with some exceptions, three
main thrusts of ethical criticism:
1. pragmatic and rhetorical ethics as expounded by Nussbaum, Booth and
others;
2. the ethics of alterity — of difference, of otherness as expounded by
French theorists regarding the work of Derrida, Levinas, and Miller;
3. political approaches to ethics, with the main exponents being such
luminaries as Homi K. Bhabha and Luce Irigaray.
Yet as Shang indicates, these three principal strands did not develop into a fully
independent discipline or an individual critical school devoted, in specific, to
ethical study. In China, the refinements of ethical criticism may be found in the
sophisticated work Nie and Shang, two critics whose evolving discourse point to
a renaissance in the ethical project as a matrix of critical interpretation. Chinese
theorists such as Nie and Shang clearly realize, as with their Anglo-American
precursors, the significance of understanding our moral interrelationships with
imaginative works of literature. As the eminent British dramatist Tom Stoppard
recently observed, our shared international literatures possess a unique power to
move us towards vital moments of ethical reflection that can prompt us into muchneed,
even life-affirming and culture-shifting action. As Stoppard remarked —
speaking in particular about theatre’s signal role in contemporary life — our desire
for spectacle “fulfills one of the prime functions of art in society, namely to reflect
and interpret and offer a critique of the social environment it lives in” (Stoppard).
With such a mandate still in the offing for a world beset by challenge and crisis, can
the fundamental need for an ethical criticism ever truly lose its sway?
Alterity and the Ethics of Place in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End
As our historical study of the ethical project reveals, as an interpretive paradigm,
ethical criticism offers a valuable lens for examining the manner in which literary
characters experience moments of moral clarity and interpersonal change.
Originally published in 1924-1928, Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End illustrates
a variety of ethical principles inherent in the evolving critical vocabulary of
continental philosophy’s postwar ethical turn. In Parade’s End, Ford deftly
explores the nuances of literary realism, while simultaneously experimenting
with the technique of Impressionist “rendering” that he had contemplated with
great frequency in his nonfiction. Ford imagined writing a novel “on an immense
scale, a little cloudy in immediate attack, but with the salient points and the final
impression extraordinarily clear. I wanted the Novelist in fact to appear in his really
proud position as historian of his own time.... The ‘subject,’” Ford added, “was
the world as it culminated in the war” (qtd. in Bradbury xvii). Ford’s conception
of Impressionism affords Parade’s End with its precise formal structure, as well as
with its significant ethical agenda. In addition to its historiographic components,
Parade’s End addresses a range of issues regarding the moral crises following
the Great War and the conflict’s substantial influence upon the abidingly complex
interrelationship between French and British culture and society.
Originally published as four novels — Some Do Not..., No More Parades,
A Man Could Stand Up —, and Last Post — Parade’s End traces the war- and
peace-time experiences of Christopher Tietjens; in this manner, Ford’s tetralogy
encounters a number of revealing aspects of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophies
of the self, alterity, and otherness. As Jill Robbins observes in Altered Reading:
Levinas and Literature (1999), Levinasian ethics “denotes the putting into question
of the self by the infinitizing mode of the face of the other” (xiii). Ford’s ethical
imperatives in Parade’s End are most dramatically underscored by Marie Léonie’s
powerful interior monologue, which shrewdly establishes the French point-of-view
regarding the staggering social and cultural atrocities of the First World War. Her
dramatic meditation — perhaps more than any other moment in Ford’s tetralogy —
genuinely reveals the complex “face” of England’s French “other.”
In Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas (1998), Robert Eaglestone
argues that “Levinas’s thought cannot be turned into a methodology: it is not a
philosophy that can be applied.... To ask for a Levinasian critical method is to
ask for something that cannot and should not exist” (176; italics added). In fact,
Eaglestone offers little evidence demonstrating the thrust of his contention beyond
his observation that “there is obviously no one critical process which embodies
Levinas’s ideas, no one answer” (176). Yet Levinas’s ethical philosophy quite
obviously posits its own terminology — including such concepts as “adequation,”
“alterity,” “the face,” and “negation,” among a host of others. Simply put,
Levinasian philosophy, despite Eaglestone’s misgivings, can easily be applied as
an interpretive matrix in much the same interdisciplinary fashion as gender studies,
psychology, history, and sociology — to name but a few of literary criticism’s
multitudinous allied disciplines, each of which possesses its own contingent of
thinkers with their own critical vocabularies.
Such philosophically vexed issues as obligation and responsibility, for
instance, are perhaps most usefully considered via Levinas’s conceptions of alterity,
contemporary moral philosophy’s sine qua non for understanding the nature of
our innate responsibilities to our human others. In “Is Ontology Fundamental?”
Levinas discusses the ethical significance of other beings in relation to the needs
and desires of ourselves. Our ethical obligations to others, Levinas reasons, find
their origins in our inability to erase them via negation. Simply put, unless we
succeed in negating others through violence, domination, or slavery, we must
comprehend others as beings par excellence who become signified as “faces,” the
Levinasian term that refers to the moral consciousness and particularity inherent
in others. This “primacy of ontology,” in Levinas’s words, demonstrates the nature
of the collective interrelationships that human beings share with one another (10).
In “The Trace of the Other,” Levinas argues that “the relationship with the other
puts me into question, empties me of myself” (350). More importantly for our
purposes here, Levinas describes the concept of the face as “the concrete figure for
alterity” (qtd. in Robbins 23). The notion of alterity itself — which Paul-Laurent
Assoun characterizes as “the primal scene of ethics” (96) — refers to our inherent
responsibilities and obligations to the irreducible face of the other. These aspects
of our human condition find their origins in the recognition of sameness that
we find in others. This similarity of identity and human empathy establishes the
foundation for our alterity — in short, the possibility of being “altered” — and for
the responsibilities and obligations that we afford to other beings.
In Time and the Other (1979), Levinas identifies the absolute exteriority
of alterity, as opposed to the binary, dialectic, or reciprocal structure implied
in the idea of the other. Hence, alterity implies a state of being apprehended, a
state of infinite and absolute otherness. In “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,”
Levinas writes that “we can say that the alterity of the infinite is not canceled, is
not extinguished in the thought that thinks it. In thinking infinity the I from the
first thinks more than it thinks. Infinity does not enter into the idea of infinity, is
not grasped; this idea is not a concept,” he continues，“The infinite is radically,
absolutely, other” (54). Alterity’s boundless possibilities for registering otherness,
for allowing us to comprehend the experiences of other beings, demonstrates its
ethical imperatives. Its exteriority forces us to recognize an ethics of difference
and of otherness. Such encounters with other beings oblige us, then, to incur the
spheres of responsibility inherent in our alterity. When we perceive the face of the
other, we can no longer, at least ethically, suspend responsibility for other beings.
In such instances, Levinas writes in “Meaning and Sense,” “the I loses its sovereign
self-confidence, its identification, in which consciousness returns triumphantly to
itself to rest on itself. Before the exigency of the Other (Autrui), the I is expelled
from this rest and is not the already glorious consciousness of this exile. Any
complacency,” he adds, “would destroy the straightforwardness of the ethical
movement” (54).
Drawing upon Levinas’s critical matrix of alterity, a reading of Ford’s ethical
imperatives in Parade’s End demonstrates the author’s considerable humanistic
agenda for “altering” our perspectives of war and atrocity via his well-honed
Impressionistic techniques. In his landmark essay, “On Impressionism,” Ford
describes his conception of Impressionism in terms of its capacity for impacting
— and, indeed, ultimately altering — readerly perspectives: “Always consider
the impressions that you are making upon the mind of the reader,” he writes, “and
always consider that the first impression with which you present him will be so
strong that it will be all that you can ever do to efface it, to alter it or even quite
slightly to modify it” (39). In Ford’s postulation, the Impressionist technique
affords novelists with the ability to capture the nuances of genuine humanity that
mark our lives and to ponder the occasional moments in which we reveal the
nature of our inner selves: “I suppose that Impressionism exists to render those
queer effects of real life that are like so many views seen through bright glass,”
Ford observes, “through glass so bright that whilst you perceive through it a
landscape or a backyard, you are aware that, on its surface, it reflects a face of a
person behind you. For the whole of life is really like that,” Ford adds, and “we are
almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite other” (41). Ford’s
Impressionistic technique involves the careful construction of a series of layers of
meaning that work in concert in order to evoke various images and emotions. As
Max Saunders notes, “Ford responds to the complexity of war-torn Europe not by
impressing his own designs upon his material, but by rendering the complexity. His
fiction does not work to subordinate everything to his voice,” Saunders continues，
“It re-creates the play of conflicting voices, volitions, attitudes, and viewpoints”
(211). Simply put, through his assembly of details and revelations in his novels
concerning the lives and proclivities of his characters, Ford attempts “to produce an
illusion of reality” in the mind of the reader (44).
This notion of an “illusion of reality” allows Ford to shape the ethical
perspectives inherent in such narratives as The Good Soldier (1915) and Parade’s
End. In Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society (1999), Harpham
observes that “ethics does not solve problems, it structures them” (37). In
Parade’s End, Ford structures his novel’s ethical dimensions by imagining a vast
Impressionistic expanse regarding the Great War and its sociocultural aftermath.
Perhaps even more effectively than with his depiction of the bewildered (and
bewildering) John Dowell in his masterwork of narratology and concentration,
The Good Soldier, Ford’s tetralogy succeeds in portraying the ways in which
conscious minds engage in the act of perception and, in some cases, wallow in
sheer ignorance. In Parade’s End, the novel itself concerns the collapse of Tory-
Christian values after the First World War. A central text in the modernist canon
of the 1920s, Parade’s End functions as a kind of “crisis epic” or “anti-epic,” in
the words of Malcolm Bradbury, that “deals with peace and war, society as it has
formed itself in the belle époque era, and society as it is shattered by war” (xvi).
The tetralogy’s protagonist Christopher Tietjens — the “last Tory” — witnesses
the violence and social hypocrisy of postwar Europe, while also pondering the end
of a cultural and political epoch in England. Although much of the novel involves
Tietjens’s perspectives of war and its aftermath, Parade’s End devotes considerable
attention to his protracted bout of sexual warfare with his adulterous wife Sylvia,
who confronts him with yet other social paradigm shifts of a sort in the guises of
polygamy, divorce, and the New Woman. Perhaps even more interestingly, though,
is the manner in which Ford’s novel recontextualizes French war- and peace-time
experiences for its largely English-speaking audience.
Of particular interest to this essay, then, is Marie Léonie’s powerful —
and, for some critics at least, controversial — interior monologue that features
prominently, and some argue disconcertingly, in the tetralogy’s final installment,
Last Post. Ancillary to much of Parade’s End’s narrative, Marie Léonie’s inclusion
as a central character in Last Post surely presented Ford with considerable textual
difficulties. As Arthur Mizener writes: “Ford exercised all his ingenuity to justify
his abrupt introduction of her, but there is no getting around the fact that, in using
her, he multiplied entities unnecessarily and shifted attention from the real center
of the action; though it is easy to understand why, with his lifelong passion for
the French, Ford found her irresistible” (508). The genesis of her name offers an
intriguing antecedent in itself. As with Ford’s contemporary, Princess Marie-Léonie
Bonaparte (1870-1947) — herself the distant inheritor of a vanquished regime —
Ford’s French heroine in Last Post finds herself on the precipice of a new world
order that dares to redraw the boundaries of the sociocultural relationship between
England and France. In Last Post, Marie Léonie shares a North Country cottage
with her dying lover, Christopher’s older brother Mark, as well as with Christopher
and his mistress Valentine. Marie Léonie’s efforts at nursing Mark back to health
after his stroke will come to no avail. Thematically, a dying Tory like him simply
cannot survive in the new world. Similarly, Christopher and Valentine will not be
able to hide in the provinces from Sylvia forever; eventually, the bold and brazen
twentieth century — embodied in the figure of Sylvia herself, no less — will
descend upon them in the cottage, and their perceptions of, and places within, the
post-Armistice world will become altered irrevocably.
For this reason, Ford uses Marie Léonie’s interior narrative as the means via
which he registers his principal characters’ displacement in the postwar world. Her
monologues in Last Post provide Ford’s English readership with the opportunity for
distinguishing the Levinasian “face” of their hitherto concealed French other. Ford
accomplishes this end by allowing Marie Léonie to reveal her particularity and her
continental perspectives throughout her interior narrative. Ford describes her as
being of “the large, blond, Norman type; in the middle forties, her extremely fair
hair very voluminous and noticeable. She had lived with Mark Tietjens for twenty
years now,” Ford adds, “but she had always refused to speak a word of English,
having an invincible scorn for both language and people of her adopted country”
(737). Marie Léonie’s existence within the close environs of her adopted English
family forces them to recognize her alien presence, to confront a very different
perspective of the Great War and its outcome. For Mark, Ford writes, “No doubt
twenty years of listening to the almost ceaseless but never disagreeable Marie
Léonie had been a liberal education” (785). Perhaps even more importantly, though,
her interrelationship with the Tietjens family forces them, and especially Mark, to
reconceive the First World War and the resulting balance of power in Europe from
a markedly different vantage point. On Armistice Day, English buglers solemnly
“played the Last Post on the steps of the church under Marie Léonie’s windows”
(787). Rather than being consumed with nostalgia for the England of days gone by
or relieved by the nation’s recent withdrawal from war-time Europe, Marie Léonie
can only think of the numerous French dead and the needless waste of a generation.
For her, the bugle’s dirge — “a funeral call at three in the morning” — is an affront:
“It was betraying her country to have given those [German] assassins an armistice
when they were far from their borders,” Ford writes,“Merely that was treachery on
the part of these sham Allies. They should have gone right through those monsters
slaying them by the millions, defenseless, and then they should have laid waste
their country with fire and sword. Let them too know what it was to suffer as
France had suffered” (838).
As the tetralogy—and, hence, the end of his own life — comes to its
conclusion, Mark finally and rather pointedly perceives Marie Léonie’s otherness
through his altered relationship with her in specific and with France in general.
Mark’s “long association with Marie Léonie, his respect for the way in which she
had her head screwed on, the constant intimacy with the life and point of view
of French individuals of the petite bourgeoisie which her gossip had given him
— all these things together with his despair for the future of his own country had
given him a very considerable belief in the destinies and indeed in the virtues of
the country across the Channel,” Ford writes (806). By demonstrating his English
characters, and especially Mark, in the act of reconsidering their interrelationship
with France through the auspices of Marie Léonie’s particularity, Ford underscores
the value and significance inherent in our ethical obligations to others. Ford’s
Impressionism — his “illusion of reality” — merely functions as the engine of
Parade’s End’s ethics of alterity. The rest is up to us.
Notes
1. We owe this observation to the distinguished Russian literary critic Igor Olegovich Shaytanov’s
prescient remarks during the 4th International Symposium on Ethical Literary Criticism held at
Shanghai Jiao Tong University in December 2014.
2. Rosenblatt’s contributions to reader‑response criticism receive special attention in Terence R.
Wright’s review‑essay, “Reader‑Response under Review: Art, Game, or Science?” The value of
Rosenblatt’s transactional theory of reading, Wright argues, “lies in its recognition of both sides
of the ‘reading transaction,’ reader and text” (542).
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