Emotion as Ethical Event and Revision of Romance as Catharsis: the Fiction of Anita Brookner

1My contention here is to show that Anita Brookner’s unmistakable style is no mere adornment, but a fundamental, vital necessity. Her autobiographical fiction stands at the exact junction between body and intellect.1 It is the result of emotion that links thought to experience, that transforms abstract empirical sensual knowledge into intellectual systems. Her writing has paradoxically been accused both of emotional dryness and of being Mills & Boon for bluestockings. Indeed, there is no denying that the repetitive writing lacks strong action, that the highbrow style is so restrained that it can be perceived as dull, yet the main theme is always the protagonist’s search for love. These contradictions point to a to and fro movement between emotion and impersonality, which are inextricably interlinked. I shall try to show that Brookner’s dry style in fact acts as a screen to underlying violent emotions, which are the starting point or creative matrix for highly analytical novels, the key of which is the pervasive intertextuality and finally that the act of writing itself is a way of coping with threatening emotions, a life-saving operation.2

2The heroine’s comments upon Constant’s Adolphe could be applied to Brookner’s own writing: ‘the potency of this particular story comes from the juxtaposition of extremely dry language and extremely heated, almost uncontrollable sentiments.’3 The author herself says she ‘[does] like a rational world’4 and yet adds that she started writing because she was ‘at the mercy of circumstances and in danger of being swamped by them.’5 Indeed, Brookner’s highly rational, controlled style hides passionate feelings, mirroring both her heroines’ split selves and her obsessive themes.

3At the root of this insistent dualism is the underlying tension between romantic sensibility and intellectual control, taking the form of a constant opposition between romantic dream and harsh reality. Brookner the art historian says she specialised in French art between 1750 and 1848 because she was fascinated by ‘the manners of a people who are struggling between the extreme rationalism... of the Enlightenment and wild emotion, which is the emotion of the Romantic movement.’6 The heroine’s sense of defeat and conscious rejection of romantic excess is constantly undercut by inextinguishable Romantic hopefulness.

4The heroines all typically present a calm reasonable appearance, which is only a mask for strong feelings, as says one of them: ‘I am famous for my control which has seen me through many crises. By a supreme irony, my control is so great that these crises remain unknown to the rest of the world and I am thought to be unfeeling.’7 Their attempt at reasonable virtue is but a superficial varnish, hiding dangerous passions: ‘Extreme discipline kept her in check, while demons, she knew, circled and waited.’8 Their daytime selves are repeatedly described by terms such as an ‘armour,’ a ‘carapace’ or a mere ‘artifice,’ enclosing a menacing nocturnal persona (Brookner says she is a fervent admirer of Freud).

5The passion so threatening to order is desire for love. It is often briefly hinted at in scattered laconic phrases that the virginal-looking heroine is far from frigid. Her calm exterior masks a passionate nature: as she drifts into sleep and dreams of marriage, we are told that she ‘saw herself calm, and pleasant, and controlled, and suitable’; this is then belied by one short ironic statement: ‘But later that night, she burned in fires.’ (Providence 165) One married heroine is described as ‘outwardly a pleasant-looking middle-aged woman,’ but as ‘inwardly luxurious, ruminating adventure.’9 The young heroine is not as inexperienced as she may seem and France is generally her hunting ground. This repressed passion threatens to break out at night and undermine the whole social edifice: ‘I thought of my strange dream... And my fear was that the gap would yawn so wide that the whole wall would collapse, and the room with it.’10

6Brookner treats the emotionally charged subject of sex with quiet restraint and decorum, but emotion is always subtly suggested before or after the actual elliptical description. Here is a description of sex between the heroine and a typically flighty unreliable lover:

She had slipped next door to the cake-shop . . . They ate ravenously, their mouths perfumed with the sweet mixtures. When they kissed, they exchanged identical breaths, and she made a vow she would never forget that particular taste as long as she lived. While he lay in the bath, she sat at the window and looked out at the wet street. It was raining hard now... (Brookner 1982, 126)

7Here the sex is simply bracketed out, but the pathetic sentimentality of the over-romantic heroine’s unrealistic expectations is mockingly expressed through the sharing of sickly food and the sadness of the separation to come is hinted at through the use of pathetic fallacy. Food in Brookner is always symbolical of communion and the heroine’s terrible loneliness is conveyed by what she calls her ‘spinsterish fare’11 and by hypallages such as ‘an isolated dover sole’12 or ‘her solitary table.’13

8The subject of death is treated with the same restraint. Realistic details are never gorier than the mention of a pillow ‘stained with vomit’ and ‘noises coming from the bathroom’ in the case of a character whose terminal cancer is simply hinted at by: ‘It’s in the liver.’ (Brookner 1991, 113-4) But again, food is used to convey the inexpressible sense of horror and loss incurred by the deaths of loved ones. For example, the death of a mother is laconically announced by the phrase: ‘she must have died in the night,’ leaving the reader to imagine the loneliness of death. The pathos is subtly suggested by a sentence a few lines further: ‘When I got there the first thing I saw was the abandoned biscuit with which I had tried to tempt her the previous day.’14

9Thus Brookner, in a penetrating search for the essential, eschews the superfluous and does away with the decorative. There is never any padding. The narrator-heroine wants to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, which she says is ‘the stuff of literature itself,’ adding nevertheless that she has never met anyone ‘who could stand literature when not on the page.’ (Brookner 1981, 10) The truth cannot be seen face to face, it has to be told ‘slant’ as in Emily Dickinson’s poetry, through indirection, allusiveness, ellipsis, obliquity, imagery, which requires an effort on the part of the reader to read ‘slantwise’ too. Nevertheless, strong emotion everywhere underlies the dry style.

10The fundamental underlying emotion is anguish, which is twofold: it is a mix-up of desire and fear. It is the result of romantic desire thwarted and the resulting fear of dying alone, of the loneliness resulting from the gap between romantic dreams and harsh reality. It is expressed through repetitive semantic fields and metonymies. The major semantic field of loneliness is replete with words that recur obsessively throughout all the novels: solitary, empty, deserted, absence, exclusion, isolated, unaccompanied, etc. This is reinforced by what function as metonymies of solitude: benches in public gardens, absent prams in the hall, unused wombs, visits to art galleries, looking out of windows, solitary meals, silent streets, overtidy flats, endless week-ends and evenings, etc. Solitude is associated to sadness, giving another related semantic field. This in turn, leads to dissatisfaction, longing, envy, desire for change and fear. The novels are also replete with detailed and starkly realistic descriptions of the body’s descent into old age and of death foreshadowed, the factual highly realistic style barely masking the underlying anguish, as novel after novel harps on the fear that lurks beneath the calm surface, with screw-like repetitiveness. Anguish gives rise to another pervasive semantic field (restless, anxious, uneasy, nervous, tense) and more metonymies as the heroines endlessly walk the streets of London, take bath after bath, are plagued by migraines and insomnia and threatened by madness.

11Content becomes form as sound echoes sense, the repetition of words and images, which both denote and connote anguish, moving them away from a referential pole towards a rhetoric that can be seen as an example of Jacobson’s ‘poetic function’ in non-poetic discourse.15 Repetition as rhetoric uses metonymic items metaphorically, creating a feeling of defeat and non-existence through repetitive patterns stiflingly superimposed from novel to novel, reinforcing the circular structure that inevitably brings the heroine back to where she began. Time stretches out endlessly for Brookner’s protagonists, who spend their time waiting in a ‘tortoise existence,’ and are compared to the Lady of Shalott, Penelope, Shakespeare’s Mariana or Chaucer’s Griselda. They feel ‘half dead’ because of ‘unlived lives’ due unfulfilled desire. Their lives are characterised by absence—‘My life... an empty room.’ (Brookner 1991, 254)

12The fundamental problem is an absence of love. But Brookner’s notion of love as perfect communion and reciprocity is neither the old-fashioned sentimental love found in Mills & Boon, nor the desirous erotic love of the modern subject bound up in itself. It is to be taken in the broader sense of Platonic agape, which is the love Jakob Winnberg considers to be ‘hyperordinate’ to the return of ‘sentimentum’ in postmodern literature: ‘Love encompasses the relation to and the responsibility for the other, as well as the longing, the suffering and the bliss involved in that relation; and, ultimately, love avers and is averse to death.’ Thus in Brookner’s text, ‘the longing and the suffering are not a result of the failure of the ego’s project so much as of the failure of intersubjective connection.’16

13The anguish resulting from the gap between desire and reality not only subverts the apparent rationality of the text. It overwhelms the subject, goads writing on, haunting it without respite. Thwarted desire for ‘true love’ is the creative matrix for an intellectual analytical style, whose hallmarks are the impersonal practices of wit, irony and especially of intertextuality. The heroine-cum-narrator who has always passed middle age in the time of narration, obsessively reviews her life in order to try and understand where she went wrong, in a desperate effort to get at the truth through memory, to edit her experience. The constant self-reflexive retrospective mental narration has to be conscious, intellectual and analytical if meaning is to be inferred from the past, yet the whole work is addressed to longing, which is treated with implacable lucidity.

14The question, ‘Why am I unhappy?’ leads to the ethical question, ‘How should a life be lived to be happy?’ I shall call this unhappiness the ‘ethical event,’ which motivates Brookner’s highly intellectual analytical style. Alain Badiou ‘calls “truth” an “event” ( “événement”) the occurence of which effectuates a new mode of being, “ethics” being the work of fidelity to this truth.’17 Emotion as longing motivates the heroine to question and analyse her behaviour, which in turn leads her to question the moral rules underlying this behaviour. This indeed fits the definition of ‘postmodern ethics’ as a specific reaction to a particular situation grounded on emotions. As such, it is opposed to ‘morals,’ defined as universal, abstract rules grounded on reason. According to Andrew Gibson, ‘ethics operates a kind of play within morality, holds it open,’18 whereas morality is concerned with consolidating existing rules of conduct. Questioning the past and concerned with an ‘ought’ rather than an ‘is,’ ethics is utopian and turned to the future. Ethics is linked to questioning and subversion, whereas morality is linked to conformity. Ethics as moral reflection is based on emotion as reaction to a concrete situation, which is the sole yardstick for judging what is good for us. Emotion thus comes before reasonable analysis, triggers it off. Gibson clearly links ethics and emotion: ‘sensibility... might be thought of as a receptiveness which even precedes cognition and makes cognition possible [my italics].’ (Gibson 162)

15The answer to the reason for the heroine’s unhappiness lies in all the novels’ pervasive intertextuality, which has been too often either ignored or judged as indicator of an ‘abstract fake literary style,’ but which I believe is the key to the whole work. Brookner’s novels indeed constantly refer to other literary texts, mainly to nineteenth-century authors, but also to older texts spread out over historical time and space, going as far back in time as the Bible, ranging from Chaucer, through Shakespeare and Jane Austen, to Tennyson, Dickens, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot. Not only are English authors referred to: Anglo-American authors like Henry James and Edith Wharton, French authors like Balzac and Flaubert (to quote but a few), Russian authors like Tolstoy and Tchekov are also present. Literary classics figure alongside the Mills & Boon romances of Barbara Cartland and Georgette Heyer and the fairy tales of Grimm and Andersen. These are the texts that have formed the heroine. Indeed if the intellectual heroine, who has literally been educated through books, is unhappy it is because, ‘reading for life,’ she has identified with the virtuous heroines of literature, like Cinderella, Little Dorrit, Jane Eyre or Fanny Price, but has warily ‘[pondered] the careers’ (Brookner 1981, 7) of the passionate adulterous Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina. In Judith Butler’s terms, she has been ‘instituted’ by literary models, by linguistic structures and her identity is a ‘discursive construct, something that is produced, not a natural fact.’ Brookner’s heroine is thus presented as an ideological construction, as her personality is the result of world-views embodied in literary discourse rooted in a specific historical context.19

16Now, most of the texts after which the heroine has modelled her self belong to the tradition of the ‘classic realist text,’ which embodies the values of liberal humanism, Christianity and Cartesian rationalism and presents a comforting moral lesson through its poetic justice, namely that reasonable virtuous Christian selfless conduct, based on the repression of disruptive desire in the name of social order, is rewarded by happiness in the form of love, social success and integration through marriage. Indeed, sentimentality and sensibility in such texts were ‘about being virtuous and doing good, about caring for the other and, ultimately, about being a good Christian.’ (Winnberg 50) They belong mainly to what Northrop Frye calls the ‘comic fictional mode’20 set in the tradition of romance. He defines romance as a mode, which has desire as basic component in the form of what he calls ‘wish fulfilment.’21 As Jameson explains, ‘Romance is for him a wish fulfilment or utopian fantasy, which aims at the transfiguration of everyday reality... the quest-romance is the search of the libido or desiring self for the fulfilment that will deliver it from the anxieties of reality but will still contain that reality.’22 Frye thus describes the classic realistic novel with its traditional happy end as ‘a realistic displacement of romance.’ (Frye 1976, 38) The heroine’s expectations of happiness through virtue rewarded by perfect love have also been forged by fairy tales, Harlequin romance, songs and films, making her the result of ‘mythological conditioning’ by the ‘interconnecting body of stories’ formed by prose romance, which Frye calls a ‘secular scripture’ embodying ‘a single integrated vision of the world, parallel to the Christian and biblical vision.’ (Frye 1976, 11, 15) As for the classic texts, which the heroine has been taught to be wary of, they belong to what he calls the ‘tragic fictional mode,’ in which the immoral character is punished by being isolated from society. But the moral lesson of these tragic and truly romantic novels of adultery is the same as that of the novels set in the tradition of romance, namely that the individual must conform to society by repressing desire in the name of reason, emotion in favour of reason and intellect.

17But emotional experience makes the heroine call into question the claims of reason. Life has led her to discover that ‘the patterns of desire, hope and expectation that are formed and called forth by her experience of reading’23 are unrealistic when put to the test of her emotions: instead of bringing her the expected happiness, her good behaviour has only led to solitude. This is why the first novel starts off with the words, ‘Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.’ (Brookner 1981, 7) Forced to admit that, ‘the happy end had never come about,’24 she denounces the fairy-tale version as a ‘fraud’ (Brookner 1992, 222) and rejects Dickens as ‘wrong’ because ‘the world is not won by virtue,’ noting that only Balzac tells the truth, as his novels ‘teach the supreme effectiveness of bad behaviour.’ (Brookner 1981, 99, 34) Forced to come to the conclusion that, ‘[i]t was as if the Bible had been spreading false doctrines,’ (Brookner 2001, 60) she decides she would prefer to be ‘a bad winner than a good loser’ in the game of love.

18This leads to a philosophical reflection on modern society. The heroine analyses her unhappiness as the direct result of her being ‘half way between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’: she has tried to obey moral rules rooted in a previous epoch, yet she experiences life in the second half of the twentieth, which witnesses a ‘changing moral landscape.’ (Brookner 1986, 18) The author echoes her heroine (see especially Kitty in Providence) in her interviews and in her recent book entitled Romanticism and its Discontents,25 explaining that the demise of both reason and God at the end of the eighteenth century has had disastrous consequences for traditional morality upholding social behaviour: ‘[I]t was discovered that once you were no longer constrained to be good, either by Christianity or by a secular philosophy which for a time was even stronger, namely the Enlightenment, there was no limit to bad behaviour.’26 Traditional rules of good conduct embodied in nineteenth-century novels have lost their foundation and cannot be historically transposed to a modern world characterised by the absence of stable moral values. In a return to the laws of nature, in which Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ is the only rule, the winners are those who greedily and selfishly grasp what they want and impose their desires on others, as is exemplified by what happens in the ‘game of love.’ Thus the rules of behaviour which one should follow to find happiness must be re-written to fit a new historical context in which selflessness leads to unhappiness, whereas selfishness permits one to obtain what one desires. But the heroine, who wants to change in order to be successful in love, yet is incapable of abandoning her ideals, is left oscillating helplessly in a ‘no man’s land’ between the two poles of binary strictures. She is ‘aware of something out of joint’ and ‘would have preferred the books to have been right.’ (Brookner 1981, 100)

19Although writing is a means of intellectually working through an emotional problem, the fact of understanding and explaining the reasons for the sadness and anguish is not in itself sufficient to cope with these life-threatening emotions. Indeed, the heroine had already reached these conclusions in the first novel, yet all the following novels are variations on the same theme. That Brookner keeps on examining the same problems in her autobiographical novels and is still writing a novel a year (even though the text at times seemed to indicate that she would stop) would suggest that the act of writing itself plays a crucial role in the author’s life. As Judith Butler argues in Excitable Speech, writing does something, has an effect on real life. Writing is not only an intellectual instrument used to work through a moral problem triggered off by emotional judgement, but also has the immediate cathartic value of providing relief for strong feelings, as the text becomes the vector for ‘transitive emotion,’ which is transformed into ‘intransitive emotion.’

20As she reviews her life in order to understand it and control it intellectually, Brookner’s heroine simultaneously and compulsively re-writes the stories that have shaped her to fit a new reality. The re-visioning of her life involves both deconstruction and reconstruction, both the laying bare of the ideological conditioning that has produced her and the parodic (architextual27) re-vision of the romance plot to fit a new historical context.28 The romance-quest plot itself is constantly undercut and re-written in an ironic mode, as the familiar storyline of ill-fated romance crops up again and again, the ‘wish-fulfilment’ component of romance being split in two: the ‘wish’ is still fundamentally present, but the ‘fulfil-ment’ is missing, as the heroine’s romantic wishes are repeatedly thwarted: ‘Quiet simply, the desire remained. But the desire, she knew, must also remain unsatisfied.’ (Brookner 1991, 133) An unhappy ending typically replaces the traditional happy ending and poetic injustice is the rule, as good behaviour ironically leads to unhappiness: the manipulative selfish seductresses marry the desirable men and obtain the desired social status, whereas the heroine, when not condemned to leading a lonely spinsterish life of exile, has to be content with clandestine affairs, with being the mistress of the one man she truly loves or with being unhappily married. Instead of presenting the traditional ideal picture of love and marriage, these extremely witty novels depict an exaggeratedly disillusioned view of romantic love and marriage as highly incompatible, as though starkly realistic anti-romance were a comic antidote to dangerously untruthful romance and laughter could help to denounce the false promises of romance, underpinned by the philosophical tradition known as Western liberal humanism. Conscious that she is in fact ‘kicking over the traces’ (Brookner 1981, 100)29, the heroine tries to break free from moral rules, which no longer apply, however regrettable this may be.

21The semantic fields and images of sadness, loneliness, unhappiness and anguish remain constant throughout the work, because the narrator-heroine always writes from past ‘middle age,’ presented as the point of biological no return, when it is too late both to cast off the roles built into her and to found the family she would so much liked to have had. If the rules governing behaviour can be re-thought (for future generations), her life is already lived. It cannot be re-lived, only lived ‘backwards’ (Brookner 1994, 121) and re-written: ‘[She] was only incidentally planning for the future. What [she] was really doing was correcting the past, rewriting [her] own history.’ (Brookner 1994, 150) The sadness and regret for an unlived life cannot be eradicated. But what does change chronologically is the tone, as the bitter anger of the first novels gradually disappears. Indeed, the ‘dissonant self-narration’30 of the first novel gradually gives way to greater consonance between the heroine’s older and younger selves. The biting irony, which the older more lucid narrator directs at her young experiencing self, gradually gives way to a more serene tone, as regret replaces anger: ‘Life has brought me to this condition of acceptance.’ (Brookner 2001, 217) Writing thus evacuates anger, which is transferred from real life to books. The act of writing thus satisfies both unhappiness and art, turning the first into the second.

22Moreover, the heroine, whose work usually involves books, repeatedly makes it clear that, ‘[w]ork for [her] had done duty as an alternative life.’ (Brookner 1994, 107) She can be considered as a stand-in for the author, who admitted in an unguarded moment: ‘Writing is a very lonely activity... If I were happy, married with six children, I wouldn’t be writing.... Writing has freed me from the despair of living.’ (Interview with Guppy 151) What Margaret Atwood says about the act of writing can throw light on the way in which writing can be used to cope with unhappiness. She suggests that writers are double: the ‘life side’ does the living, whereas the ‘art side’ does the writing. The two selves ‘alternate. They are attached head to head. Each empties his or her vital substance into the other.’ The living self has to be murdered in order to write. The crucial moment when the two selves meet is that in which the writing act takes place and life stops to produce the work into which both selves evaporate to continue to exist inside the work.31 Writing fights against melancholy, as the unhappiness is transferred to the work and, like Scheherazade, the heroine-cum-narrator-cum-author has to continue telling her story in order to survive. Brookner herself admits in her first interviews: ‘writing novels was a kind of first aid... it worked momentarily... if it were therapy, I wish it had worked. It doesn’t work that way, which is why I have to keep on doing it.’ (Haffenden 59)

23Finally, in the whole work writing is associated to regression and fusion with the heroine’s dead mother’s haunting presence. I will dare to put things rather bluntly and simplistically by suggesting that, not having been able to participate in the instinctive survival of the species—another of Brookner’s favourite themes—by procreating and thereby transforming death into life, she dies to life to be symbolically re-born through writing. Indeed, for many critics literary creation corresponds biologically to the double instinct of conservation and reproduction.32 Brookner’s autobiographical fiction seems to be a good illustration of the role of writing both as a means of retarding death by making life bearable and as a rebirth or a means of triumphing over the fear of death, her fiction illustrating the conclusion to John Donne’s Holy Sonnet X: ‘And death shall be no more; Death thou shalt die.’

24I have tried to show to what extent Brookner ‘intellectualises her feelings and feels her thoughts,’ as did the seventeenth-century Metaphysical poets before a ‘disassociation of sensibility’ set in after the Baroque period, according to T. S. Eliot.33 The whole narrative method or form of Brookner’s fiction indeed illustrates the interdependence and dialectical relation of emotion and impersonality, of life and art, of body and intellect—intellectual analysis is triggered off by emotion and in turn helps to relieve emotion, art being the site of dialogic interplay between the cogito and the world. Moreover, her fiction illustrates (in spite of the misleadingly dry style) the primary role given to emotion, which is presented as both the source and the finality of intellectual analysis. It illustrates what Brookner, the art historian, writes about John Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding in her book on the eighteenth-century painter, Jean-Baptiste Greuze: ‘all knowledge is the outcome of a dual process of sensation and reflection. The origin of our knowledge is to be sought in our senses. Knowledge thus acquired is eventually translated into judgement or reason.’34 Or, in Virginia Woolf’s terms, ‘we learn through feeling.’ Emotion, as concrete reaction to specific situations in the world, is the yardstick by which the efficiency of abstract moral rules is to be measured, as it tells us what is good or not for us. ‘Love’ is ‘knowledge’ to borrow the title of Martha Nussbaum’s book, Love’s Knowledge, i.e. the certainty of perceptual self-impressions is the only criterion of truth that permits us to apprehend reality. (Nussbaum 263-269)

25Emotion and ethics converge in Brookner’s fiction, as emotion functions as a catalyst to break open frames and challenge traditional cognitive systems (or, in Lyotard’s terms, ‘grand Narratives’).35 Emotion helps to deconstruct traditional discourse (large groups of statements governing the way we behave and rooted in specific historical moments) embodied in literature and signal the way for reconstruction. Thus a whole Western philosophical tradition, which originates in a binary mode of thinking— the basic opposition self/other is at the origin of a whole series of related oppositions: mind/body, emotion/reason, cognition/sensibility, life/art, etc.—is shown to be sterile, because antinomic to happiness, which is dependent on love as intersubjective connection. Neither selflessness (repressing one’s self in the name of the self of the other), nor selfishness (repressing the other in the name of one’s own self) appear to be viable bases for a social contract.

26Brookner’s fiction thus comments on the world, but in an ‘oblique’ or metafictional manner, which is far more problematic than classic realism’s mimesis and which seems to be typical of postmodern literature’s return to a realism re-viewed through the filter of modernism. The texts, which are realistically rooted in autobiographical time and space and depict highly realistic characters, in fact imitate and use the conventions of traditional realism in order to question its philosophical underpinnings from within. Instead of positing a simple one-to-one correspondence between reality and text, they work on the discourse that determines our representations of the real, tending to re-work the past through its texts. Just like an individual life, the historical past cannot be re-lived, but it can be re-written by revisiting its texts from a new point of view. By working on the imaginary domain, which underlies and forges behaviour, literature can thus modify the rules underpinning social life and call for future change. If our behaviour is instituted through abstract linguistic representations, the re-writing of these representations of reality from real life experience can modify future behaviour.

27The very impression of suffocation and emptiness in these novels, transferring ‘intransitive emotion’ back to the world through the reader, ironically calls a contrario for a new mode of being in the future, one that does not oppose self and other, emotion and reason—namely for a feminist ‘relational self’36 (or a Levinsian self, instead of a Cartesian ego), for an ethical encounter with, in Paul Ricœur’s words, ‘oneself as another’37 and for a new type of social contract based on mutual understanding, something like what Jürgen Habermas has in mind when he speaks of the exhaustion of the ‘paradigm of the philosophy of consciousness’ and advocates ‘communicative reason’ whereby ‘acts of mutual understanding take on the role of a mechanism for co-ordinating action.’38 The obvious failure of subject-centred reason calls for a return of emotion, not as Mills & Boon sentimentality, but as ethical connection to other, as Brookner’s fiction uses irony and parody to call for a ‘re-association of sensibility.’