A look at the ethical aesthetic of Girl, Woman, Other
A happy problem for those of us who write on contemporary fiction is the continuous expansion of the field. After I completed the manuscript for The Novel and the New Ethics, I read Bernardine Evaristo’s 2019 Booker Prize–winning novel, Girl, Woman, Other, and wished I could have included in my book a chapter on her work.
Girl, Woman, Other: Evaristo’s title trumpets the centrality of identity to its representational project while also making explicit the specific categories of identity which are its guiding concern. But while the title implicitly links the value of literature in the contemporary moment with its capacity to depict—to turn Georg Lukács’s phrase—a new social order and new type of woman, it also raises the question of what literary fiction brings to identity as a personal and societal project.1 To make social space for new identities, why not pen one’s autobiography or profile the lives of real women?
The Novel and the New Ethics » argues that crucial to the contemporary understanding of fiction’s social value is a belief in fiction’s power to offer a meaningful encounter with otherness. The contemporary writers I discuss—Toni Morrison, J.M. Coetzee, Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Gish Jen, Richard Russo, and Marilynne Robinson—all share Evaristo’s belief that “slipping into the skin of characters who are clearly not myself” (as Evaristo puts it) is the defining ethical task of the fiction writer.2 Importantly, all these contemporary writers each pursue that ethical task with a full awareness of the political and ideological limitations that make the goal of “becoming other” (to use Morrison’s phrase) an aspirational goal that inspires an ongoing ethical endeavor.3
Whether or not we believe that novels offer a privileged encounter with otherness, it certainly is the case that contemporary novelists who do believe this have helped to consolidate a novelistic aesthetics of alterity—and my book is particularly interested in theorizing the terms and attributes of this formalist ethics. As I show, the problem of otherness is not just a defining problem in the diverse social worlds that these novels depict but also is at stake in narrative practice, especially in the representation of fictional characters whose identities are other to the author. Evaristo remarks that once she set to writing Girl, Woman, Other, her desire to represent the diversity of Black British female identity was so great that she thought the work would stretch to include “a thousand characters”: “I was so frustrated that we were not peopling the pages of fiction in this country that I just thought, ‘I’m going to create as many different characters I can.’ But in the end I thought I had in a sense made my point with twelve of these women.”4 Evaristo’s point—to create characters that diversify the category of Black British women—also points back to its author. By what power, right, or ability does the novelist slip into the skin of social others? In Girl, Woman, Other which of the twelve characters in this multi-perspectival novel seem to pose no barrier to authorial inhabitation? Which characters resist authorial omniscience? How does Evaristo’s use of what she calls “close third person” establish the ethical possibilities of and limitations to representing characterological personhood? How does this novel’s innovative use of typography contribute to or detract from the representation of characterological personhood as point of view? Such interpretative questions define the content of the form of Evaristo’s narrative engagement with otherness and contribute to the rich complexity of this novel’s aesthetic power.
Whether or not we believe that novels offer a privileged encounter with otherness, it certainly is the case that contemporary novelists who do believe this have helped to consolidate a novelistic aesthetics of alterity—and my book is particularly interested in theorizing the terms and attributes of this formalist ethics.
Happily, Evaristo’s novel hasn’t been the only new publication that furthers the ideas in my book. Just as I was completing the manuscript, Zadie Smith published an essay in The New York Review of Books that reaffirmed the argument for ethical otherness that she has made since the very beginning her career. In “Fascinated to Presume,” Smith restates her abiding belief that her desire to write fiction and her capacity to be a successful novelist spring from a lifelong desire to “know what it is like to be everybody”: “what it would be like to be Polish or Ghanaian or Irish or Bengali, to be richer or poorer, to say these prayers or to hold those politics.”5 Since The Novel and the New Ethics features a chapter on Smith, I was very glad to have this up-to-the-minute confirmation of her position. But I also noticed that in this new article, Smith sounds more embattled. She feels under attack by a counterformulation of literary ethics: the belief that “only an intimate authorial autobiographical connection with a character can be the rightful basis of a fiction.” Those who hold this position pressure novelists to let go of the lives of others. “The old—and never especially helpful—adage write what you know has morphed into something more like a threat,” she notes. Namely, “Stay in your lane.”6 Significantly, Richard Russo, a very different novelist from Zadie Smith, published an article in Harper’s about six months after Smith’s that defends the novel’s ethics of alterity in terms that are so similar to Smith’s that Russo even uses some of the same phrasing:
I know—of course I do—that I can’t really be a black man any more than I can really be a nun. But why constrain the imagination, the very thing that helps us get over ourselves? Are artists really supposed to stay in their lanes? Okay, granted, it’s not possible to be somebody else. We’re stuck with who we are. But this only means that when we pretend otherwise, both as readers and writers, we’re playing a very important, very serious game. We can’t be somebody else, but we have to try.7
While Smith and Russo uphold the ethical value of “trying” to be other, we find Evaristo has already undone the notion that writing about what you know relieves the novelist from the problem of being responsible for others and otherness. Her 1997 Lara, based on Evaristo’s own life and family history, arguably stays in its own lane by making the author’s intimate “autobiographical connection with a character . . . the rightful basis of a fiction,” to use the terms of the counterformulation of literary ethics referenced by Smith. But Evaristo also makes abundantly clear that an autobiographical connection cannot solve the problem of knowing other people as ethical others: “I . . . questioned whether or not I could write the white characters, because I had come out of a radical black feminist stance, and I wondered, ‘can I get inside of the white characters?’”8 So profound is the social difference created by cultural racialization that Evaristo asks this question even though the white characters she seeks to depict are based on her own white mother and grandmother.
Both the ethical defense of fiction’s responsibility to otherness and the ethical attack on authors who won’t “stay in their own lane” are equally pertinent for the argument I lay out in my book. It is less important to decide for one ethical position or another than it is to understand why so many contemporary writers and literary critics assume that otherness (either as a virtue to be cultivated or an act of appropriation to be avoided) is at stake in the narrative modes of novelistic representation. By elaborating the theory and practice of the formalist ethics developed from within this literary tradition, The Novel and the New Ethics helps explain why Evaristo and other contemporary novelists develop new narrative strategies to express the degree and kind of closeness they can achieve in relation to the “inside” of characters different from themselves--and also why the novelistic art of slipping into a character’s skin adds ethical friction as a component of novelistic aesthetics.
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Notes
1. Georg Lukács, Studies in European Realism, 10. Trans. Edith Bone. London: Merlin, 1950.
2. Bernardine Evaristo, 441. Interview with Jennifer Gustar, “Putting History in Its Place: An Interview with Bernardine Evaristo. Contemporary’s Women’s Writing 9:3, November 2015, 433-447.
3. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, 3. New York: Random House, 1992.
4. Evaristo. Interview with Tom Gatti, “We are pretty invisible in fiction”: Bernardine Evaristo on power, racism and her wild Eighties days.” October 23, 2019. https://www.newstatesman.com/bernardine-evaristo-interview-booker-prize-joint-win
5. Zadie Smith, “Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction,” 4. The New York Review of Books, October 24, 2019, 4-10.
6. Ibid, 6.
7. Richard Russo, 27-34. “The Lives of Others,” Harper’s, June 2020, -34.
8. Evaristo, 443. Interview with Jennifer Gustar, “Putting History in Its Place.”
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Posted by: Heisenberg | December 12, 2020 at 05:37 AM