The writing for this week’s class was by Wayne Booth and titled The Peculiar “Logic” of Evaluative Criticism. It’s actually a chapter specifically from this book: The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction.
One of the things I noticed about this reading is the publication date: 15 December 1989. Because of this, I knew I would approach this reading with an eye to how it would not take into consideration things relating to the internet, and definitely not considering social media. This is an aspect of writing that has become prevalent in modern society and likely would not have been even a theory back in the late 80s.
Some of the most interesting points in this chapter surround the ethics of how a critic approaches speaking about a work, and I feel like the main question we can walk away from this chapter with is: What responsibility does a critic have to represent a work without imposing their own bias, or is the true responsibility to criticize a work fully through the lens of their own bias while applying their own ethical mores to their review?
There is an example in the first paragraph of the first page of this chapter that I think absolutely supports my idea for the main question we are considering here, “Too many ethical critics have assumed that their whole task is to damn what is evil or to expose other critics as incompetent or immoral for failing to do so” (Booth 49). This is a theme that Booth goes back to repeatedly in this article; questioning not only the responsibility of an ethical critic, but also questioning what formula could be used to apply the ethics and rules to every piece of work an ethical critic might come into contact with. This is pointed to again in a quote from William James featured on page 57, “No two of us have identical difficulties, nor should we be expected to work out identical solutions” (Booth, 57). This is, perhaps, a difficult example to follow, but the way I interpreted the quote (which is a very meta thing to do with this topic) was that no two people have had the same experiences in life, they were raised in different environments, by different people, who had different importance levels for various moral and ethical things. We are no two of us identical (not even identical twins) when it comes to the way our life experiences have changed us.
This can also apply to the ideas of harm in literature which we see on pages 56 and 57 before the James quote. Who defines what themes are too harmful to be within literature? For example, the book that came to mind when I read this, Octavia Butler’s Kindred. There are some very dark themes in this book: slavery, rape, violence, murder, suicide. These are hard topics to talk about, and it is hard to stomach a book that sheds so much light on the inherent violence of a slave’s existence in the 1800s in the south here in the United States. However, this was a truth that many people had to live through – ignoring the reality from our comfortable homes in the modern world (much like the main protagonist in Butler’s book who was from the 1900s) doesn’t make those problems go away. On page 62 Booth states, “every use of language carries freight … Our minds are unable to resist making sense of whatever data we encounter, even if they are in fact random” (Booth, 62). I feel like these ideas deeply tie into the consideration if the hard themes in Kindred are actually bad, or if they are too harsh to be in literature. The freight here is the hard themes, which are factual if dramatized – the data we encounter is the reality of how bad slavery really was in a more concrete way than just being told that slavery is bad.
With these thoughts in mind, I must think that Booth would say that Kindred was a “good” book, ethically, because it helps educate readers on the horror of what slavery was and why it is bad ethically to walk a path that might lead to this being present in the world again. It is hard to read, it should be hard to read, and it drives home a very strong ethical standpoint: owning another human is a bad thing. Therefore the unethical topics and views of the antagonists (which are evil by their very nature) are serving a purpose for good in this book: illuminating the right path to go down. So, the conundrum would be clear to an ethical critic, right? Evil topics within this story lead readers to the ethical choice. The story must, then, be good.
