Mount Moriahs and Molehills: Ethics, Dialogue and the Dialogue Novel
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Karen Langhelle
Abstract
In Le Roman dialogué après 1950: poétique de l'hybridité (Boblet, Honoré Champion, 2003), Marie-Hélène Boblet claims that the dialogue novel emerged as an aesthetic response to the Second World War, attempting to address the ethical concerns of a Europe in ruins by heralding a new humanism based on and guaranteed by dialogue itself. Dialogue has a fundamentally ethical structure of discursive co-operation between self and other issuing in a mutually constructed ‘we’. Boblet asserts that the dialogue novel avails itself of this structure. Yet few, if any, dialogue novels can be said to fulfil the promise that Boblet associates with them. Situated at one remove from philosophy while still heavily marked by it, the dialogue novel rather constitutes a Derridean non-lieu that encourages us to problematise the ethico-philosophical expectations that have accumulated around the concept of dialogue, expectations that have proved eminently transferable to literary theory and criticism.
Set precisely in the aftermath of the war, Henry Green's dialogue novels are a case in point. Green insists on including or reinserting the dysfunctions of dialogue within dialogue itself, thus calling into question any ‘ideal purity’ to the concept of dialogue (as Derrida does). As the characters in Green's Nothing struggle with problems of meaning and saying, so they come to realise that dialogue does not necessarily guarantee mutual understanding nor the full disclosure of meaning: the other will always remain, in Derrida's words, tout autre. Nothing opens up the possibility of another species both of dialogue and ethics, both involving conditions of undecidability. Since dialogue cannot function as an ethical framework that reduces the unknown and saves us from undecidability, ethical decisions must be made in the absence of complete knowledge. The suspension involved in the moment of undecidability leaves speakers open to the speech of the other; yet, in responding to this call, they must sacrifice answering the calls of all those ‘other others’ to whom they are bound in the same general relation of responsibility. Like decision and responsibility, dialogue turns out to be ethically both problematic and paradoxical: it ensures ethics only by risking the sacrifice of ethics. Green's characters may accuse each other of turning molehills into mountains, but in Nothing, every molehill is always already a Mount Moriah. Here dialogue supports Derrida's claim that the sacrifice of Isaac marks even “the most common and everyday experience of responsibility”.
Articles in the same Issue
- Literature and/as Ethics: An Introduction
- Should We Read or Teach Literature Now?
- Mount Moriahs and Molehills: Ethics, Dialogue and the Dialogue Novel
- Irreversibility
- Before the Aesthetic Turn: The Common Sense Union of Ethics and Aesthetics in Shaftesbury and Pope
- The Logic of Affect: Romance as Ethics
- Writing the Event and the Ethics of Love in J. M. Coetzee's Age of Iron
- Die Reflexion der Dummheit: Über Ethik und Literatur
- Varieties of English in Writing: The Written Word as Linguistic Evidence, ed. Raymond Hickey
- The Routledge Handbook of World Englishes, ed. Andy Kirkpatrick
- Ursula Lenker, Argument and Rhetoric: Adverbial Connectors in the History of English
- Anne Scheller, Bezeichnungen für die christliche Gottheit im Altenglischen
- Carla Cucina, Il Seafarer: La navigatio cristiana di un poeta anglosassone
- Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts in Microfiche Facsimile, ed. A.N. Doane, Matthew T. Hussey and †Phillip Pulsiano. Vols. 14–17 and 19
- On the Aesthetics of Beowulf and Other Old English Poems, ed. John M. Hill
- Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination, ed. David Clark & Nicholas Perkins
- Wolfram R. Keller, Selves & Nations: The Troy Story from Sicily to England in the Middle Ages
- Jane Bliss, Naming and Namelessness in Medieval Romance
- Gabriela Schmidt, Thomas More und die Sprachenfrage: Humanistische Sprachtheorie und die translatio studii im England der frühen Tudorzeit
- Rudolf Beck & Konrad Schröder, Handbuch der britischen Kulturgeschichte: Daten, Fakten, Hintergründe von der römischen Eroberung bis heute
- Franz-Karl Stanzel, Telegonie – Fernzeugung: Macht und Magie der Imagination
- Neil Forsyth, John Milton: A Biography
- Romanticism and Celebrity Culture 1750–1850, ed. Tom Mole
- Wolfgang Clemen im Kontext seiner Zeit: Ein Beitrag zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte vor und nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, ed. Ina Schabert, unter Mitarbeit von Andreas Höfele und Manfred Pfister
- Peter Freese, The Clown of Armageddon: The Novels of Kurt Vonnegut
- Eva-Sabine Zehelein, Science: Dramatic: Science Plays in America and Great Britain 1990–2007
- Literature After 9/11, ed. Ann Keniston & Jeanne Follansbee Quinn
- Sieglinde Lemke, The Vernacular Matters of American Literature
- Native Americans and First Nations: A Transnational Challenge, ed. Waldemar Zacharasiewicz & Christian Feest
- Nancy Grimm, Beyond the “Imaginary Indian”: Zur Aushandlung von Stereotypen, kultureller Identität & Perspektiven in/mit indigener Gegenwartsliteratur
- Alison Donnell, Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History
- Perspectives on the ‘Other America’: Comparative Approaches to Caribbean and Latin American Culture, ed Michael Niblett & Kerstin Oloff (Brigitte Glaser)
- Eingegangene Schriften
Articles in the same Issue
- Literature and/as Ethics: An Introduction
- Should We Read or Teach Literature Now?
- Mount Moriahs and Molehills: Ethics, Dialogue and the Dialogue Novel
- Irreversibility
- Before the Aesthetic Turn: The Common Sense Union of Ethics and Aesthetics in Shaftesbury and Pope
- The Logic of Affect: Romance as Ethics
- Writing the Event and the Ethics of Love in J. M. Coetzee's Age of Iron
- Die Reflexion der Dummheit: Über Ethik und Literatur
- Varieties of English in Writing: The Written Word as Linguistic Evidence, ed. Raymond Hickey
- The Routledge Handbook of World Englishes, ed. Andy Kirkpatrick
- Ursula Lenker, Argument and Rhetoric: Adverbial Connectors in the History of English
- Anne Scheller, Bezeichnungen für die christliche Gottheit im Altenglischen
- Carla Cucina, Il Seafarer: La navigatio cristiana di un poeta anglosassone
- Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts in Microfiche Facsimile, ed. A.N. Doane, Matthew T. Hussey and †Phillip Pulsiano. Vols. 14–17 and 19
- On the Aesthetics of Beowulf and Other Old English Poems, ed. John M. Hill
- Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination, ed. David Clark & Nicholas Perkins
- Wolfram R. Keller, Selves & Nations: The Troy Story from Sicily to England in the Middle Ages
- Jane Bliss, Naming and Namelessness in Medieval Romance
- Gabriela Schmidt, Thomas More und die Sprachenfrage: Humanistische Sprachtheorie und die translatio studii im England der frühen Tudorzeit
- Rudolf Beck & Konrad Schröder, Handbuch der britischen Kulturgeschichte: Daten, Fakten, Hintergründe von der römischen Eroberung bis heute
- Franz-Karl Stanzel, Telegonie – Fernzeugung: Macht und Magie der Imagination
- Neil Forsyth, John Milton: A Biography
- Romanticism and Celebrity Culture 1750–1850, ed. Tom Mole
- Wolfgang Clemen im Kontext seiner Zeit: Ein Beitrag zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte vor und nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, ed. Ina Schabert, unter Mitarbeit von Andreas Höfele und Manfred Pfister
- Peter Freese, The Clown of Armageddon: The Novels of Kurt Vonnegut
- Eva-Sabine Zehelein, Science: Dramatic: Science Plays in America and Great Britain 1990–2007
- Literature After 9/11, ed. Ann Keniston & Jeanne Follansbee Quinn
- Sieglinde Lemke, The Vernacular Matters of American Literature
- Native Americans and First Nations: A Transnational Challenge, ed. Waldemar Zacharasiewicz & Christian Feest
- Nancy Grimm, Beyond the “Imaginary Indian”: Zur Aushandlung von Stereotypen, kultureller Identität & Perspektiven in/mit indigener Gegenwartsliteratur
- Alison Donnell, Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History
- Perspectives on the ‘Other America’: Comparative Approaches to Caribbean and Latin American Culture, ed Michael Niblett & Kerstin Oloff (Brigitte Glaser)
- Eingegangene Schriften
