The ethics of uncertainty

About this book

The premise for this dissertation is three-fold. Literature and ethics are connected because they are both concerned with the human; because they are both steeped in uncertainty; and because they both produce experiential knowledge. Reading uncertain narratives engages particular movements of the mind and these movements contribute not to what, but to how we know ethically. I borrow from ecological psychology the notion of affordance, the perceived and actual properties of a thing that determine just how it could possibly be used. Literature is structurally suggestive: it affords certain ways of reading. These movements of reading in turn suggest what I call ethical modes. I stake this claim about reading and ethics through an analysis of "three types of uncertainty": mutual exclusion, repetition, and multiplicity. Henry James's The Turn of the Screw and Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, by switching between the possibility of ghosts or conspiracy and the possibility of delusional protagonists, present two cases of mutually exclusive narratives. Mutual exclusion compels us to read via oscillation, which infuses movement into the self/other relation and affords an ethics of projection, whereby we alternate between projecting onto and projecting into the other. The repetitions of Bret Easton Ellis's American Pycho, by vacuating violence of intention, meaning, and culpability, afford us the opportunity to view horrific events in suspension, an ideal mode for exploring the darker side of ethics. Toni Morrison's Beloved exemplifies how multiple perspectives obscure and particularize, affording the related modes of discretion and discreteness. By reading Beloved next to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Franz Kafka's "In the Penal Colony," and Suzan-Lori Parks's The Red Letter Plays, we see an effect of multiplicity stemming from the adjacency of perspectives: they jostle together and produce the spark of something new, a mode that I call the ethics of the adjoining.