Abstract
Narrative fiction has the power to unsettle our deep-seated intuitions and expectations about what it means to live an ethically good life, and the kind of society that best facilitates this. Sometimes its disruptive power is disclosive, leading to an ethically significant shift in perception. I contend that the disruptive and disclosive powers of narrative fiction constitute a potential for ethical knowledge. I construe ethical knowledge as a learning process, oriented by a concern for truth, which involves the rational agency and affective engagement of an embodied human subject. For the purposes of showing this, I engage critically with Adorno’s reading of Kafka, using Kafka's story ‘In the Penal Colony’ to challenge Adorno’s analysis.
As a habitual reader of narrative fiction I spend a good deal of time in imaginary worlds. These offer temporary refuge from the cares of everyday life and a relatively safe space for exploring the existential and philosophical problems that confront me there. Like other readers sometimes I encounter things in the imaginary worlds that challenge aspects of life in the real world, unsettling my deep-seated intuitions and expectations about what it means to lead an ethically good life, and about the kind of society that best facilitates this. On occasion the disruption leads to an ethically significant shift in perception; in such cases, I want to speak of ‘disclosure’.
My concern in the following is with the ethical significance of the disruptions and disclosures that may occur in and through reading narrative fiction. By significance I mean its subjectively perceived importance. My thesis is that such disruptions and disclosures are epistemically significant in an ethical sense. In an Aristotelian vein, I understand ethics to be the doctrine of the good life, expanding the Aristotelian definition to include questions relating to the good society: to the social arrangements and institutions most conducive to leading a good life. I contend that the disruptive and disclosing power of narrative fiction is a potential for ethical knowledge. Importantly, I posit a connection between ethical knowledge and ethical truth. Like Aristotle, I posit some highest good, intrinsically desirable, as the organizing principle for all other goods that contribute to a good life (for Aristotle this is eudaimonia – happiness or human flourishing). By truth I mean the intrinsically desirable, highest good that constitutes the ultimate reference point for ethical reflection and action. While the term ‘truth’ may be misleading in certain respects, I use it in order to highlight the universality of the posited, intrinsically desirable, highest good; by ‘universality’ I mean its validity across historical and cultural contexts, together with the recognizability in principle of its intrinsic validity and desirability to all human beings everywhere. Furthermore, the word ‘truth’ – as opposed to ‘happiness’ – signals the intellectual aspect of the posited highest good: its power not alone to exert an affective pull, but also to engage human reasoning. It is precisely because ethical learning involves the rational agency of the individual human subject that the language of disclosure is appropriate. In my account, while the source of disclosure is always external to the human subject, the truth content emerges only by way of the agency of a reasoning, embodied subject, who reflects rationally, in dialogue with others, on the ethical significance of her experience.
An immediate objection is that in speaking of ethical significance in this robust sense I employ a vocabulary that is hopelessly outdated. Surely, the objection runs, the appropriate question to ask concerns the pleasure the story gives us – at most, the ‘beauty’ of its construction – but certainly not its relation to ethical truth. 1 A variation on this objection is raised by Theodor W. Adorno. For Adorno, the very question of significance reveals a pernicious rationalist bias. For reasons that will become clearer in the following, Adorno insists on the purely affective character of the reader’s response to a particular work of fiction: since the language of disclosure implies impact on reason as well as affects – a shift in perspective that is mediated rationally as well as affectively – he would reject my way of framing the discussion. For Adorno, the appropriate concept for the truth-related, experiential dimension of the work of art is not disclosure but mimesis [imitation]. The following discussion seeks to show that he is wrong to reject the ethical significance of narrative fiction and to make the case for the language of disclosure rather than mimesis. While engaging with Adorno helps to clarify my own, alternative, position, it is not the only reason for basing my discussion on his account of the fiction reader’s truth-related experiences. A further reason is that Adorno and I agree that the power of the work of art, in this case the work of narrative fiction, is not something purely subjective; indeed, both of us hold that its power has a potential universality: that there is a sense in which it is a potential for truth. Qua subjective experience, Adorno locates its truth potential on the level of affect; in my view, he does so at the expense of its rational component; by contrast, I see art’s truth potential as involving the interplay of affect and reason. This difference between us, while it has far-reaching implications, should not be allowed to obscure our agreement on the important question of narrative fiction’s potential contribution to truth, as the reference point of ethical knowledge and ethical learning. Since I find Adorno’s analysis of Kafka particularly insightful, I concentrate on his essay ‘Notes on Kafka’ (first published in 1953), in which he discusses Kafka’s prose writings. 2
Walter Benjamin draws attention to the parabolic mode of Kafka’s writings.
3
Adorno considers him right to do so. He agrees with Benjamin that Kafka strives for allegory rather than symbolic meaning and that his stories may fruitfully be compared with parables. Parables are succinct stories designed to illustrate some truth, ethical or religious, usually with a view to ethical or religious instruction. But as Adorno puts it, Kafka’s prose constitutes ‘a parabolic system, the key to which has been stolen’ (NK: 246). The following extract from Kafka’s fragment ‘On Parables’ could be used to illustrate Adorno’s point:
4
Many complain that again and again the words of the wise are only parables and of no use in daily life, and daily life alone is all that we have. When the wise man says: ‘Go over’ [‘Gehe hinüber’], he does not mean that we should cross over to the other side, which we could do anyhow if it was worth the trip; he means some fabulous yonder [irgendein sagenhaftes Drüben], something unknown to us, that can’t be defined more precisely, not even by him, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least. All these parables really set out to say is merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and that we knew already. But the cares we have to struggle with every day: that is a different matter.
For Adorno, to look for ethical meaning in Kafka’s stories is to ask the wrong sort of question. In his view, most commentators on Kafka make this mistake. ‘Of that which has been written [on Kafka]’, he remarks, ‘little counts; most is existentialism’ (NK: 245). In his view, Kafka has been made into ‘an information bureau of the human condition’ (ibid.), with scant attention paid to those aspects of his work that resist such assimilation. While Adorno’s explicit criticism here is directed against existentialist readings – against those who see Kafka’s writings as a source of information as to what it is to be human – implicit in his criticism is an objection to readings that see them as a vehicle for ethical instruction. Most likely, therefore, Adorno would find my concern with ethical significance profoundly misguided. In contrast to readings that look for existentialist or ethical meaning in Kafka’s stories, his approach focuses on how they resist assimilation into any system of ontology or ethics. He draws attention to one way in which he thinks they succeed in doing so: this is by simultaneously inviting and preventing interpretations of their ‘message’. In a characteristically pithy remark, he observes that in Kafka every sentence ‘says “interpret me,” and none will permit it’ (NK: 246). In other words, Kafka’s stories collapse aesthetic distance – they draw us into their imaginary worlds – while at the same time frustrating our efforts to make sense of what we find there. I think this is exactly right. However, Adorno uses his insightful analysis of Kafka’s aesthetic technique for his own tendentious purposes. He takes it as evidence for a general thesis, developed most forcefully in Dialectic of Enlightenment, which is of key importance in his theory as a whole. 5 This is the thesis that under conditions of 20th-century capitalism everyday language (which has inherently repressive tendencies) has degenerated into a closed system of instrumental rationality; as a result, any attempt at interpretation of meaning is repressive of genuine experience – since interpretation is ultimately linguistic. This view of language provides the basis for his critique of representational art as ideological and, more generally, for his negative aesthetics. Rejecting representational art, Adorno insists on the need for works of art that pursue a strategy of uncompromising negativity. To this end he advocates modernist methods of aesthetic construction, which employ techniques of fragmentation and dissociation and whose form and content are relentlessly anti-representational. 6 In the case of fiction, such techniques serve to inhibit the reader’s attempt to make sense of the content of the story in question and prevent her from developing a satisfying interpretation.
Adorno is not consistent in his view that the all-pervasiveness of instrumental rationality under conditions of 20th-century capitalism prevents rational reflection on the negative effects of this economic and social system. Not only does he make an exception in the case of critical social philosophers like himself and Horkheimer; on occasion he calls for the development of capacities for critical reflection in every human subject, seemingly confident that such capacities can be developed even within the context of 20th-century capitalism. For instance in his 1966 radio talk ‘Education after Auschwitz’, subsequently published as an essay, he states that the single genuine power standing against the principle of Auschwitz is autonomy in the Kantian sense: the power of reflectively guided self-determination; moreover that the only education that makes any sense at all is education towards critical self-reflection. 7 Nonetheless, despite these and other indications that even in the current capitalist context the reifying effects of instrumental rationality are not total, Adorno’s writings on art are indebted to a view of language as a closed system of instrumental rationality; in particular, his polemical attacks on representational art make sense only if we attribute to him this view. 8
Adorno’s view of language as a closed system of instrumental rationality also accounts for his objection to any attempt to extract significance, be it existentialist or ethical, from Kafka’s stories. As he sees it, attempts to extract subjectively important meaning merely serve to reproduce and perpetuate a repressive linguistic system. In order to effectively resist the repressive force of instrumental rationality he calls instead for modes of aesthetic activity that bypass rational reflection, enabling bodily experiences of the destruction of qualitative experience in a world dominated by instrumental rationality. 9 These experiences of negativity have a positive element for they offer a ‘minimal promise of happiness’ (Ct: 191). However, this positive element is mediated affectively rather than rationally: such experiences make us feel that things must and could be different. For Adorno, this promise of happiness is the promise of a state of reconciliation, in which human beings in their unique particularity would be reconciled with each other, with their inner nature, and with external nature. 10
In short, the truth content Adorno finds in Kafka’s writings is located subjectively at a purely affective level. On his reading, the ethical power of his stories is somatic. As he puts it: ‘He over whom Kafka’s wheels have passed, has lost forever both any peace with the world and any chance of consoling himself with the judgment that the way of the world is bad’ (Ct: 191; emphases added). Here, Adorno draws attention to the ways in which Kafka’s writings speak to our bodies, to how they evoke a sense of horror, making us feel the desolate condition of humankind under contemporary social conditions. His point is not just that Kafka’s stories have a somatic power; his claim, in addition, is that this power is undermined by any attempt to interpret their meaning. Accordingly, the ‘promise of happiness’, which for Adorno constitutes the truth of art, is something that cannot be grasped in conceptual language but can be experienced only affectively; thus, it can merely be felt, not rationally understood.
Adorno finds further support for his affectively based, negative aesthetics in Kafka’s use of gesture. Adorno agrees with Benjamin that it is characteristic of Kafka’s stories that something is gestured towards that is not signifiable. He sees Kafka’s gestures as the ‘traces of experiences covered over by signification’ (NK: 249). To illustrate this we could use a comment by Adorno on Kafka’s The Castle that he makes in a somewhat different context
11
(I quote Adorno, who in turn is quoting from The Castle): … In the gloom, Kafka gropes for an image of happiness. It emerges out of the hermetically secluded subject’s incredulity at the paradox that it can be loved all the same … When poor Frieda calls herself Klamm’s beloved, the world’s aura is brighter than at the most sublime moment in Balzac or Baudelaire; when … ‘she places her little foot on his chest’, and bends down and ‘quickly kisses him’, she finds the gesture for which one can wait an entire lifetime in vain; and the hours which the two spend lying together ‘in little puddles of beer and other garbage which covered the floor’, are those of fulfillment in a world so foreign that ‘even the air did not have a particle of the air at home’. (NK: 263–4)
The passage I quoted from Kafka’s fragment ‘On Parables’ might seem to support Adorno’s view of the repressive nature of everyday language under conditions of 20th-century capitalism, for Kafka himself seems to say that parables offer a message that is indecipherable. Indeed, we could go further: the passage quoted appears to support Adorno’s view that experiencing the power of Kafka’s stories – their promise of happiness or truth – requires us to break completely with the current order of signification – the world of common sense – and to move to a radically different world. Let me cite once more the relevant lines from the Kafka passage: When the wise man says: ‘Go over’ [‘Gehe hinüber’], he does not mean that we should cross over to the other side, which we could do anyhow if it was worth the trip; he means some fabulous yonder [irgendein sagenhaftes Drüben], something unknown to us, that can’t be defined more precisely, not even by him.
The Castle could also be read in this way. Recall the passage I quoted from Adorno’s essay in which he shows how Kafka gestures towards happiness, how The Castle presents us with a ‘moment of illumination among the gloom’: the hours that Frieda and Klamm spend lying together ‘in little puddles of beer and other garbage which covered the floor’, are hours of ‘fulfillment in a world so foreign that “even the air did not have a particle of the air at home”’ (emphases added).
However, not all of Kafka’s stories fit quite so well. The foreign worlds presented to us by Kafka are not always ‘fabulous yonders’ in an unequivocally positive or negative sense. They do not always evoke either a state of reconciliation between subject and subject, subject and internal nature, and subject and external nature, in which the repressive force of instrumental reason no longer obtains or, alternatively, a sense of horror and of the desolation of humankind under conditions of contemporary capitalism. Take, for example, the ‘foreign world’ presented to us in Kafka’s story ‘In the Penal Colony’. 14 In this story Kafka presents his readers with a fictive world that is not just alien to most of us: it is also likely to be profoundly disturbing. The penal colony is the world of the officer and the old commandant (now deceased), with their awe-inspiring, gruesome apparatus. The apparatus, a technologically astonishing writing machine, inscribes on the bodies of the condemned men the moral precept against which they have infringed and the reason why they have been sentenced to execution. The condemned men are not told their verdict, and thus not given any chance to defend themselves; this does not matter, because, as the officer says: ‘Guilt is always beyond doubt’ (IPC: 80). However, during the 6th hour of the 12-hour execution process the condemned men are able, with their bodies, in the wounds inflicted upon them by the apparatus, to read the moral precepts that are the grounds for their sentences: for the condemned man in the present case, the precept is ‘Honour thy superior’; in the case of the officer who ultimately sentences himself to death, it is ‘Be Just.’ Bodily inscription seems to be the precondition for reading, and hence understanding, the sentences. Not alone are the condemned men able to understand their particular moral transgressions only when they are inscribed on their bodies; spectators at the execution ceremony are likewise able to read the sentences only in the course of their inscription into the condemned men’s flesh. This suggests that before justice can be understood, it must be performed bodily. It is appropriate, therefore, that, in the English translation, the ceremony is described as a ‘performance’ (in German it is ‘das Spiel’) (IPC: 81). The bodily, performative aspect of this view of justice would explain why the traveller, who represents the ‘European’ perspective of the enlightened world, is unable to decipher the diagrams on which the collection of sentences has been set down by the old commandant. For the traveller has only just arrived in the penal colony and has not yet participated in an execution ceremony. When the officer invites him to read the diagrams, saying that they are perfectly clear, all the traveller can see is ‘something like a maze of criss-crossing lines covering the paper so closely that it was only with difficulty one could make out the white spaces in between’ (IPC: 82).
At first glance this story, too, seems to confirm Adorno’s reading of Kafka: it seems to support his view that since language has become a closed system of instrumental rationality, ethical truth resists all attempts to decipher it linguistically and can be known only in a bodily way. But such a reading is too restrictive. It fails to do justice to the ambiguity of language in Kafka’s writings. On occasion, at least, Adorno acknowledges this ambiguity. In his ‘Notes on Kafka’ he refers at one point to the ‘ambiguity, which like a disease, has eaten into all signification in Kafka’ (NK: 248). I take this to mean that in Kafka’s writings, language fails straightforwardly to signify. What is said or written can always mean something other than its literal meaning; moreover, it can have multiple meanings. The crucial point, which Adorno, however, fails to make, is that the ambiguity of language calls for interpretation on the part of the reader. This has implications for a philosophical or literary analysis of Kafka’s writing. For one thing, it undermines the view that language is a closed system of reifying, instrumental rationality and challenges an analysis that locates the truth content of Kafka’s stories at a purely affective level. While it certainly does not deny the affective dimension of Kafka’s writing, which, as we have seen, is crucial to grasping his aesthetic technique, it does not assert the affective dimension at the expense of the linguistically based, rational one. Taking seriously the ambiguity of language allows us to account for the truth content of narrative fiction as contributing not just to bodily knowledge but also to linguistically mediated reasoning, and thereby to ethical knowledge and ethical learning. Furthermore, it suggests the language of disclosure rather than mimesis to characterize the mode in which ethical truth is presented to the readers by way of particular textual strategies. Another important implication is that it puts the reader – the receiving subject – back into the picture as an interpreter of Kafka’s stories. 15 In Adorno’s analysis, as we have seen, readers of Kafka’s stories are at once invited to interpret their ‘message’ and prevented from doing so. As mentioned, I consider this an insightful characterization of Kafka’s technique. It is the next step in Adorno’s analysis that I find troubling. For, from here he moves to the problematic claim that any attempt to interpret the ‘message’ of Kafka’s stories undermines their truth content, which cannot be articulated linguistically by the subjects concerned but only experienced affectively. The same troubling step was evident in his analysis of Kafka’s use of gesture, where his insightful discussion of the importance for Kafka of the body as a site of ethical knowledge is inflated to the claim that Kafka’s stories express ethical truth in purely affective terms. In both cases, the result is a philosophical analysis of Kafka’s writings that demotes readers of his stories to passive recipients, subjected by the text to an ethically charged, bodily experience that cannot be articulated linguistically in an ethical vocabulary, since ethical language is part of the prevailing, all-encompassing system of instrumentally rational ‘common sense’; indeed, because any attempt by readers to render intelligible the experiences they undergo in and through reading Kafka’s stories serves to reproduce this repressive system of instrumental rationality, their interpretative efforts are dismissed in advance as ideological. In these ways Adorno’s analysis effectively denies to Kafka’s readers any active ethical agency. In addition, it seriously curtails the significance of Kafka’s writings for ethical (and political) debates in the real world: if Adorno’s analysis is correct, the ethical impact of Kafka’s stories on particular readers could never feed into their discussions with others concerning the good life for human beings, or the kind of social conditions that would best facilitate such a life, for their impact cannot be interpreted non-ideologically. Finally, Adorno’s analysis, if correct, also blocks the possibility for critical social theorizing of renewing its ethical vocabulary through critical appropriation of ethical insights prompted by world-disclosing aesthetic experiences. 16 But is Adorno’s analysis correct?
The conceptual framework of Adorno’s analysis denies us the possibility of ever knowing whether his analysis is correct. We are obliged simply to accept the truth of his analysis, for it is not open to rational contestation. This makes him vulnerable to the accusation of epistemological authoritarianism. Epistemological authoritarianism is the claim to privileged access in principle to knowledge of truth by certain persons or groups of persons. 17 The persons in question (for instance, critical social philosophers such as Adorno) establish themselves as higher authorities for truth-related knowledge and use this authority to override the truth claims of other persons. Clearly, the premise on which Adorno’s rejection of existential and ethical readings of Kafka is based – the premise that language has become a closed system of instrumental rationality – is accorded an epistemically privileged status, for it is immune to rational challenge by anyone. This is why his position is open to the objection that it is epistemologically authoritarian.
Adorno’s analysis of Kafka is not just troubling for these and related reasons. It is also a bad textual analysis, for it suppresses its own insight into the ambiguity of language in Kafka’s writings. It ignores the ways in which Kafka’s stories both invite and permit interpretations, though never stable ones. It fails to see that his texts challenge our existing perceptions of the world, while at the same time offering alternative ways of looking at things that can be articulated linguistically and evaluated rationally.
Let us return to Kafka’s story ‘In the Penal Colony’. I have mentioned the awe-inspiring, gruesome apparatus which, in a 12-hour procedure, inscribes the guilt of the condemned prisoners on their bodies, enabling them to read their sentences with their wounds. I also mentioned that the process of bodily inscription makes the condemned men’s sentences readable by those taking part in the execution ceremony. It is worth dwelling for a moment on this point. In the case of the condemned men, the officer uses the word ‘decipher’ [entziffern] to describe the way in which they gain knowledge of their sentences (IPC: 84). However, the term ‘deciphering’ is used here metaphorically, to signify a special kind of reading: it is used to signify a purely bodily process of absorbing knowledge. In the case of the condemned men, deciphering or reading cannot be understood literally, because the sentences (‘Honour thy superior’, ‘Be Just’) are inscribed by the apparatus on the backs of the condemned men. As a result, the condemned men are unable to read the sentences with their eyes; they can read them only in non-visual, bodily ways and hence metaphorically, with the wounds inflicted upon their bodies (ibid.). In the case of the spectators, by contrast, the process of deciphering or reading is meant literally. For the spectators at the execution ceremony, the process of bodily inscription of the sentences on the backs of the condemned men renders their guilt readable in a visual, literal sense: the spectators are able to read the men’s guilt as a message that can be articulated linguistically (as the message: ‘Honour thy superior’ or: ‘Be Just’). Nonetheless, like the condemned prisoners, the spectators too experience the execution process in non-visual, bodily ways. In telling the traveller about the execution ceremonies in the days of the old commandant, when the entire valley overflowed with people who came to watch the performances, the officer relates that as the apparatus began its work of execution many people ‘gave up watching entirely, lying instead on the sand with their eyes shut’ (IPC: 87). There is a clear suggestion that they did so not in order to spare themselves the distress of watching the execution but in order to intensify the sensual pleasure they derived from it. The officer relates that as the ceremony progressed, he and the spectators ‘bathed [their] cheeks in the reflection of a justice finally attained’ (ibid.), evoking an image of holding one’s face towards the warmth and glow of the sun. Pace Adorno, therefore, we can say that for (some) spectators, the impact of the execution ceremony is at once rational and affective: (unless they give up watching entirely) they both gain an understanding of the sentences pronounced on the prisoners, the justice of which they can evaluate rationally, and experience the justice of these sentences with their bodies, in this case as feelings of sensual pleasure. Similarly, for us the readers of Kafka’s story, its impact is on both an affective and a rational level. The story works on our senses and on our reasoning powers. It presents us with a picture of justice that, for most of us, at one and the same time evokes feelings of revulsion, horror, or distress and calls for rational engagement with its claims to ethical validity.
These feelings of revulsion, horror, and distress are intensified by various textual strategies, above all by strategies that inhibit attempts to deal with them by interpreting them as a justified reaction to the execution ceremony as described by the officer. As readers we are prevented from forming any simple interpretation of the story that would allow us either to embrace the execution ceremony as justice or reject it as injustice. This means that Kafka’s text actively prevents its readers from forming any stable interpretation of the ceremony that would render it safe affectively.
Outside the imaginary world of Kafka’s story, in a world governed by norms of ‘European’ rationality, in which human beings have certain inviolable human rights, in which, as a result, justice requires due process, in which verdicts are supposedly open to challenge and the death penalty (never mind torture) for the most part is seen as morally unacceptable, it is easy to reject out of hand the officer’s view of what constitutes justice. The traveller is a ‘European’, an enlightened man, and this is his reaction. He has no serious doubts that the procedure is inhuman and is concerned only with how best to convey his judgement of it to the new commandant, a task which he suspects may not be difficult since the new commandant appears already to share his view. But when we enter the world of Kafka’s story it is not so easy. In this world, as I have said, the intelligibility of the officer’s view of justice requires participation in a performance in which infliction of deathly wounds on the condemned man’s body is a part of the process of understanding. The officer considers the execution ceremony ‘most human, most humane’ and expects the traveller, whom he addresses as a man of ‘profound insight’, to see it in the same terms (IPC: 89). The officer’s view of justice is undermined for ‘European’ readers by what we see as its disregard for basic human rights and by our perception of the manner in which it is administered as torture. 18 The fact that the traveller has no doubts at all as to the injustice of the entire proceedings further supports our ‘enlightened’ point of view. But this ‘enlightened’ perspective is itself undermined by a variety of textual strategies. One of these is the unattractiveness of the ‘enlightened’ traveller compared with the ‘barbaric’ officer. The traveller, who is of course ‘us’, the ‘enlightened’ readers of Kafka’s stories, is presented as a cold man, jaded and disinterested, whose main concerns are strategic ones (notice that this is how Adorno characterizes the reified personality, embodiment of instrumental rationality, in his essay ‘Education after Auschwitz’ 19 ); this is in marked contrast to the warm, engaging, passionate, energetic, and youthful officer, who when describing the machine and the execution ceremony is moved to lay his head on the traveller’s shoulder and is constantly reaching for his hand.
My first point here is that by inhibiting our attempts to make sense of the execution ceremony as either justice or injustice, Kafka’s story intensifies our affective response to it: it denies us the comfort of a stable intellectual framework within which our feelings of horror, distress and so on could be interpreted and subjected to rational control; nevertheless, second, it does not prevent us from engaging rationally with the question of its justice/injustice. The readers of Kafka’s story, if it succeeds in engaging them, are called upon to question their ‘enlightened’ understanding of justice and to explore its limitations through reference to the officer’s alternative one. For such readers, the ethical significance of the story is not something that is readily available to them, but rather something they have to work out for themselves in reasoning processes with others (I have more to say about this epistemic indeterminacy below). The crucial point for the moment is that readers respond to the story on a rational as well as on an affective level, pondering the ethical significance of the story as well as feeling its ethical power.
It is one thing to say that narrative fiction seeks to engage the reader rationally as well as affectively; it is another to say that it contributes to ethical knowledge in a truth-related sense. My discussion so far has been silent on the question of the ‘truth of art’: it has said nothing about why we should attribute a truth dimension to the activity of reading narrative fiction; nor has it said anything about how we should understand this truth dimension, assuming that it exists.
Why should we speak of truth at all in analysing the impact on the reader of narrative fiction? I do not have a satisfactory answer to this and can merely indicate what pushes me to assert the importance of the concept of truth. My intuition is that we will prove unable adequately to account for narrative fiction’s impact on the reader unless we assume that her or his experience of its power contributes potentially to ethical learning in a robust sense. Put differently, in order to give an adequate account of the disruptive or disclosive effect of a story on a reader, we must assume that her reading experience has an ethically charged, epistemic significance. As I said at the outset, I use the terminology of truth partly in order to draw attention to the universal aspect of this significance: its subject-transcendence, in the sense of potential significance not just for a particular human subject, but for everybody. At the same time, if truth is involved in reading narrative fiction, it cannot just be truth in the propositional sense. I suggest that we think of it as ‘truth as disclosure’. Narrative fiction has the power to open up spaces – imaginary worlds – in which truth appears to particular readers. Here I want to underscore the subject- and context-specificity of the appearance of ethical truth in fiction. The disclosures that occur in and through reading fiction are contingent on a specific reader who engages with a specific text. Thus two people might read the same story by Kafka – they might even read it at the same time and in the same place – but in one case, the reading might not give rise to any ethically significant experience, while in the other case it might do so.
A further important point is that reading experiences vary in degrees of epistemic determinacy. In many cases, from the subjective point of view of a particular reader, the ethical significance of the story is not readily available; drawing it out requires a more or less lengthy and complex process of reflection. Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’ illustrates this well. As we saw, this story deploys various textual strategies to at once call on readers to interpret its ethical message and prevent them from forming any stable interpretation of it. In consequence, readers are left to work out for themselves, in dialogue with others, the ethical significance of their reading experience. In other words, even assuming that the story impacts on them affectively and challenges their existing perspective on justice, the ethical conclusions to be drawn from the text are highly uncertain. Admittedly, ‘In the Penal Colony’ is an extreme case, for it actively undermines readers’ attempts to extract a stable ethical message from it. Literary texts vary considerably in this regard. In some cases, indeed, readers are not only subjectively certain as to the story’s ethical message but have sufficient textual evidence at their disposal to convince others that their reading is the right one.
But a third important point is that appeal to the text is never on its own sufficient for the purposes of ascertaining the truth of a story’s ethical message. For the purposes of establishing its ethical significance in a truth-related, subject-transcendent sense, the reader will have to move beyond the text and engage with others in a reasoning process that draws on many different kinds of arguments, logical, theoretical, and also experientially based ones. Put differently, subjective reading experiences are insufficient for the purposes of establishing truth, irrespective of their subjective impact and irrespective of the degree to which they are epistemically determinate. This is because reading experiences are inherently unreliable epistemically. Even the most seemingly immediate disclosive experience is mediated by the subjectivity of the person in question. This subjectivity is in turn influenced by the historical and socio-cultural context that person inhabits, and by the linguistic practices of that context. Truth is always mediated truth, even when its operative mode is disclosure: even disclosed truth is articulated truth. Thus a subjective experience alone does not amount to knowledge of the validity of what is disclosed. Human subjects who, from their own subjective points of view, undergo an ethically significant shift in perception as a result of reading a particular piece of narrative fiction, may make claims for the universal significance of their experience – for the truth (in an ethical sense) of their new way of seeing things – but such ethical validity claims have to be opened to critical scrutiny in public processes of argumentative evaluation. 20
Let us return, in conclusion, to Adorno. My main aim in the foregoing was to make the case for the epistemic significance in an ethical sense of the act of reading narrative fiction. Given my conception of ethical knowledge as a learning process involving rational agency, this required me to show that such reading experiences impact on the reader’s rationality as well as on that reader’s affects. For this purpose I challenged Adorno’s analysis of Kafka’s prose writings, which, though deeply insightful in certain respects, interprets the power of these writings in terms of mimesis rather than disclosure, as a purely affective response that bypasses the agent’s reasoning powers. Thus, though Adorno, too, sees such experiences as truth-related and, indeed, conceptualizes truth as a kind of appearance, 21 truth for him is not truth as disclosure, for it is not an appearance to which the reader can respond in a rationally reflective way. In my discussion I drew attention to some unwelcome consequences of this position, such as its denial to the reader of any active ethical agency. Nevertheless, Adorno’s conceptualization of the truth of art has one great advantage vis-à-vis successor conceptions in the tradition: it unwaveringly maintains its language-transcending character. For Adorno’s successors, most notably Jürgen Habermas, (non-empirical) truth loses this language-transcendence. 22 Whereas I think we have much to learn from Habermas’ intersubjective theory of truth, ultimately I find it unsatisfactory. The core problem, as I see it, is Habermas’ advocacy of a postmetaphysical approach that construes validity entirely in language-immanent terms, at least when it comes to moral validity and to legal/political validity: Habermas reduces truth to the product of (an idealized) communicative procedure. Admittedly, Habermas’ postmetaphysical approach is self-consciously ‘abstinent’ in ethical matters – matters relating to the good life or human flourishing – but this creates more problems than it resolves. For ultimately, it leaves us with only two options: either saying nothing at all about ethical validity or construing ethical validity entirely in language-immanent terms. The first option, abstinence as regards the concept of ethical validity, would render Habermas’ approach unhelpful for our present purposes, for our concern is to clarify the sense in which narrative fiction is disclosive in an ethical sense; it is also unattractive from the point of view of critical social theory, since it would mean that the very question of the ethical truth of art would have no place in theorizing of this sort. The second option, conceptualizing truth entirely in language-immanent terms, is not an attractive one either, for, as I have tried to show elsewhere, it is hubristic and finalistic and, moreover, fails to capture the language-transcendent quality of experiences of disclosure. 23 For these reasons, I find Adorno’s language-transcending conception of truth more congenial. But Adorno denies the connection between (ethical) truth and reason-based, ethical knowledge, as well as the importance of language-using, embodied human agency in attaining such knowledge. Thus, we must move beyond both Habermas and Adorno, without losing sight of Adorno’s intuition that truth can never be reduced to an agreement reached by human subjects in even idealized language-using practices.