Reading for Life

Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities Volume 1 Issue 1 Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities Article 10 January 1989 Reading for Life Martha C. Nussbaum Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh Part of the History Commons, and the Law Commons Recommended Citation Martha C. Nussbaum, Reading for Life, 1 Yale J.L. & Human. (1989). Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh/vol1/iss1/10 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities by an authorized editor of Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact . Nussbaum: Reading for Life Reviews Reading for Life Wayne C. Booth. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Pp. xii, 534. $29.95. Martha C. Nussbaum Beaten by his stepfather, cut off from the love and care of his mother, David Copperfield turns for companionship to a company of friends whom the gloomy Murdstones have not had the forethought to suppress: My father had left a small collection of books in a little room upstairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined my own) and which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey. Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe, came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time-they, and the Arabian Nights, and the Tales of the Genii,-and did me no harm. . . . This was my only and my con- stant comfort. When I think of it, the picture always rises in my mind, of a summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life. . . The reader now un- derstands, as well as I do, what I was when I came to that point of my youthful history to which I am now coming again. In this wonderful passage (which is even more wonderful read in full), David, the mature author of his own life story, reminds his readers of the power of the art of fiction to create a relationship between book and reader and to make the reader, for the duration of that relationship, into a certain sort of friend. Novels are David's closest associates; he remains with them for hours in an intense, intimate, and loving relationship. As he imagines, dreams, and desires in their company, he becomes a certain sort Published by Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository, 1989 1 Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, Vol. 1, Iss. 1 [1989], Art. 10 Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities [Vol. 1: 165 of person. In fact, the narrator clearly wishes us to see that the influence of David's early reading has been profound in making him the character we come to know, with his fresh childlike wonder before the world of particulars, his generous, mobile, and susceptible heart. And the novel as a whole, in its many self-referential reflections, calls readers to ask themselves, as well, what is happening to them as they read: to notice, for example, that they are sometimes too full of love for certain morally defective characters to be capable of rigorous judgment; that they are perceiving the social world around them with a new freshness of sympathy; in short, that they are taking on increasingly, in the very shape of their desire and wonder, the view of David's father-that "a loving heart is better and stronger than wisdom." People care for the books they read; and they are changed by what they care for-both during the time of reading and in countless later ways more difficult to discern. But if this is so, and if the reader is a reflective person who wishes to ask (on behalf of herself and/or her community) what might be good ways to live, then it becomes not only reasonable, but also urgent to ask: What is the character of these literary friendships in which I and others find ourselves? What are they doing to me? To others? To my society? In whose company are we choosing to spend our time? These questions are obvious enough. We ask them all the time, in many contexts: when we draw up reading lists for our students, when we recommend novels to our friends, when we guide our children's reading. But recent literary theory, on the whole, has either avoided or actively scorned these issues. This resistance has several distinct sources. One is the belief that ethical criticism of literature is bound to be dogmatic and simplistic, measuring the literary work by a rigid normative yardstick which ignores the complexities of the literary form. And, in fact, the suspicion has some justification; a great deal of ethical criticism has been like this. Another source of resistance is the well-entrenched philosophical idea that aesthetic interest is fundamentally distinct from practical interest, an idea according to which ethical assessment of an aesthetic work would be a crude error, betraying the assessor as failing to understand the nature of the practice of aesthetic assessment. A closely related source of resistance is the fashionable recent dogma that literary texts refer only to other texts and not to the world-an idea implying, once again, that it is a naive error to ask how literature speaks to and about us. The old formalism and the new defense of "textuality" are distinct in terminology, but they have many links of motivation and argument. Still a further obstacle to ethical evaluation is the view, also fashionable, that all ethical evaluation is irretrievably subjective. This is sometimes expressed, in the literary world, by saying that all reason-giving is a kind of power-seeking, all argument the expression of "ideology." And finally, we must mention disaffection and https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh/vol1/iss1/10 2 Nussbaum: Reading for Life 19881 Nussbaum loss of love. Professional writers about literature too often end up losing contact with the love of books, with the fresh delight that led David Copperfield to his friendship with the "glorious host." But once that delight is lost, little remains for evaluation, and it is easy to see why the whole idea loses its allure. In this fine, rich book, Wayne Booth takes on all of these opponents, including the last, and makes out a compelling case for the coherence and importance of ethical criticism. He does this with a vigor and-openness of engagement that remind us of our own experiences of literary absorption and delight. (Booth does not discuss David Copperfield or the passage I have quoted, but his entire book could be seen as a commentary on it.) According to Booth's guiding metaphor, a relationship with a literary work (and he explicitly includes his own book here), is a kind of friendship; and a good friendship, he says, is something voluntary. It is, then, a little difficult to know how, in light of this m (...truncated)