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    Plan détaillé Texte intégral Introduction: from one Conception of Identity to Another; from one Conception of Alterity to Another 1 Narrative Identity and Ethical Responsibility 2 The Ethics of Otherness in a Modernist Form Notes de bas de page Auteur

    Ethics of Alterity, Confrontation and Responsibility in 19th- to 21st-Century British literature

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    Table des matières

    The Relation to the Other in John Cowper Powys’s Wolf Solent (1929)

    Florence Marie-Laverrou

    p. 121-132

    Résumé

    Using Paul Ricœur’s twofold definition of identity as well as his notion of narrative identity, the paper analyses the way the eponymous character of the novel becomes aware of the difference between his character (idem-identity) and what the French philosopher calls ‘self-constancy’ (ipse-identity) while discovering his responsibility towards the Other. Ethics— the idea of developing a non-violative relationship to the Other—is at the core of the narrative, all the more so as the structure of the narrative itself mirrors the main protagonist’s evolution. The novel increasingly makes room for other voices (through other characters’ writings) and the paper analyses the ways in which the reader’s experience becomes one of opening onto the Other, a typical modernist experience likely to affect the narrator-reader relationship.

    Texte intégral Introduction: from one Conception of Identity to Another; from one Conception of Alterity to Another 1 Narrative Identity and Ethical Responsibility 2 The Ethics of Otherness in a Modernist Form Notes de bas de page Auteur

    Texte intégral

    Introduction: from one Conception of Identity to Another; from one Conception of Alterity to Another

    1At the beginning of the novel, Wolf Solent, the well-named main character of the story sees himself as an imperial self, or rather as a closed, locked up, separate ego and ‘the core of his being [as] a little, hard, opaque, round crystal.’1 The first thing he does in the opening pages of the novel while he is on a train from London to Dorset is to make a promise to himself, namely to remain truthful against all odds to his own set of values, which he calls his ‘mythology’2 (it is a promise which is recurrent: ‘There’s one thing,” he thought to himself..., “that I’ll never give up.’ [25]; ‘Nothing shall make me yield.’ [169])

    2What is striking about this promise is that he makes it before arriving in Dorset and meeting all the people he is to meet in the course of the narrative. As such the promise testifies to his will to occupy ‘the place of foundation’3 in his own life and is based on the idea that there is ‘some unchanging core of personality’4 at the heart of his identity. He characterises his selfhood (‘his profoundest personal pride’ [8]) by reference to sameness. In that sense Wolf equates this promise and the notion of ‘sameness’ (mêmeté), the idem part of his identity if one uses the notion developed by Paul Ricœur in Oneself as Another.5 The philosopher distinguishes between two attributes of identity—idem and ipse. The concept of identity must be understood within the context of permanence through time, which can mean sameness (idem) or self-constancy (ipse). Self-constancy or ipse-identity ‘implies no assertion concerning some unchanging core of personality’ (Pellauer 90) This leads Ricœur to highlight ‘keeping one’s word’ as a way of proving one’s self-constancy, of remaining faithful to something you have said to the other in spite of the changes wrought by time, that is to say in the absence of sameness. The act of keeping one’s word has then for Ricœur an ethical signification. Now, Wolf clearly fails to distinguish between these two attributes of identity precisely because he sees himself as a fixed self, ‘a constant set of dispositions that remains the same across time.’6

    3Wolf’s conception of identity does not leave much room for the other. The promise he makes in the first chapter is a promise he makes to himself. Yet the other is present in an indirect way, when Wolf recalls the face of a man ‘he had seen on the steps outside Waterloo Station’ (3) and whom he associates with words such as ‘misery,’ ‘despair’ and ‘woe’ (3). The word ‘face’ is repeated eight times in seven lines, which makes one think of Emmanuel Levinas’s writings about the face.7 Nevertheless this face does not liberate Wolf from his ego. At first he even manages to reduce this epitome of alterity to sameness by incorporating it into his system of values. That this face, however, should be mentioned right from the start is probably telling and points to the subterranean way in which it will progressively shatter Wolf’s conception of identity in the course of the narrative. For the time being, however, it remains an abstract other Wolf Solent keeps away from because ‘[Love] demanded a response. It called for mutual activity. It entailed responsibility’ (43), all the things he is bent on avoiding at all costs in order to preserve his mythology from any form of encroachment.

    4Six-hundred pages later, on the contrary, Wolf has lost his mythology and he seems to have become aware of the other within him, of the otherness at the core of his identity in process. The first two manifestations of the passivity that otherness entails according to Ricœur are highlighted in the novel, namely ‘the passivity represented by the experience of one’s own body... as mediator between the self and a world... Next... the passivity implied by the relation of the self to the foreign, in the precise sense of the other (than) self’ (Reagan 28).8 Thus the self turns out to be ‘a non-centred subject exemplifying ‘ipseity’ rather than ‘sameness’ and Wolf cannot pretend to occupy ‘the place of foundation’ (van den Hegel 86) at all times.

    5Leaving aside Wolf’s new relation to his ‘lived body,’ which literally saves him in the last but one chapter of the novel (574, 600, 601, 603, 606, 611), I will focus on his relation to the other, which is made explicit by his ‘narrative identity.’ I will then show the parallels that can be drawn between the evolution of his relation to the other characters and his evolution as a reader / listener of poetry, an experience which progressively enables him to ‘respond responsibly to the otherness of a literary work’: ‘There is no necessity between being a good reader, in this sense, and being a good person...; nevertheless, some of the same values are at work in both spheres.’9 While examining Wolf’s evolution as a reader / listener of poetry, I will discuss the ways the narrative itself makes it possible for the reader’s experience to become an opening onto the Other.10

    1 Narrative Identity and Ethical Responsibility

    6Wolf’s arrival in Dorset is a kind of birth, which is probably why the scene symbolically takes place on a train (1–11). Although he is thirty-five, his previous life, which seems to have been centred on his mother, is passed over in silence. Escaping from London and from his mother—at least for a while—Wolf has the inkling that he is about to discover another kind of life altogether as if nothing had ever happened to him until then. Thus the recurrent words of the first part of the novel are ‘new,’ ‘plunge’ and ‘edge’ (‘he was on the edge of all manners of dark entanglements’ [71; See 21, 25, 112–113]).

    7In the course of the narrative, the identity which he progressively acquires and which turns out to be so different from the identity he considers as his in the first chapter is in fact the result of what Ricœur defines as ‘narrative identity.’ It is an identity in the making and corresponds to Wolf’s ‘adventure’ (36, 39) in Dorset. When in the first chapter of the novel, Wolf reduces his subjectivity to ‘sameness,’ he overlooks the temporality of the individual self. By the end of the narrative, however, he has learnt to see ‘the self as an entity living through and within time.’11 This temporality is imposed on him by the narrative itself, since the novel spans one year.

    8The temporality of the narrative means that with the benefit of hindsight, what could be seen as happening in a haphazard manner becomes a plot. One of Wolf’s remarks in the last third of the book (‘When Chance has once started things, a sort of fate sets in that a person has to accept!’ [463]) echoes Ricœur’s analysis of ‘narrative identity’: ‘This forces the “identity of character” to be summed up in the “history of a life.” Thus “chance is transmuted into fate”’ (Rasmussen 63).

    9This is triggered by emplotment, the operation that draws a configuration out of a simple succession. In the first part of the novel, the word ‘event’ is used several times as if to intimate that in Wolf’s opinion what is happening has nothing to do with him: ‘Well! The event must work itself out. In no sense was he responsible’ (129); ‘[he was] an irresponsible chance-driven offspring’ (197). Wolf is adamant that his identity (namely his mythology) ‘ha [s] no outlet in any sort of action’ (8). By the end of the narrative, however, the words ‘action,’ ‘activity,’ ‘decision,’ ‘indecision’ have replaced the word ‘event’ (‘the misery of these decisions assumes time’ [417]; ‘this wretched necessity for action, for decision, for using what is called ‘the will’’ [431]). Wolf acknowledges that he has become, whether he wants to or not, an agent, a ‘combatant’ (113), although at first he dreamt of himself as a ‘spectator’ (112–113). This evolution converges with the fact that in Ricœur’s words ‘human action is a fundamental mode of being.’12

    10Wolf has been forced ‘to make movements’ (460) and to assume responsibility, for in the course of the narrative he has met other people, has become ‘entangled’ (71) with them and has ‘meddled with’ their lives (270). He may have married Gerda for the wrong reason, namely lust, but he nevertheless finds himself responsible for her (‘how terrible the responsibility was when a man had once undertaken to ‘make’, as the phrase runs, one of these fragile beings ‘happy’’ [310].) He has fallen in love with Christie, who pines for him too; he has found out he has a half-sister, whose happiness he would like to foster, and he has decided to undertake, then to give up and finally to complete the writing of a book he abhors in order to help his mother—or so he thinks. His life can no longer be seen in isolation, as he himself realises: ‘He began furtively trying to annihilate with his imagination first one life and then the other from his obstinate preoccupation. But the effort proved hopelessly futile’ (209). Compared to the man he was in the first chapter, no wonder he feels ‘clogged and burdened’ (277). His commitment to the real world has taken him beyond himself because ‘action is interaction’ (van den Hengel 87, 84).

    11Indeed, whereas Wolf thought he had written the story of his life long ago and in advance (‘a well-composed story that he himself, long ago and time out of mind, had actually composed’ [330]), he finds himself located in stories rich in contingencies and action. Sometimes he is the agent, sometimes the patient, for as Ricœur says every narrative is ‘a dialectic of action and affection’ (Langsdorf 47). Here the word ‘affection’ is used in the sense of ‘being acted upon, influenced or changed’). As a result, Wolf is prone to make other people suffer as when, for example, he decides at the last minute not to have sex with Christie (‘"I have hurt her feelings,” he said to himself, ‘in the one unpardonable way” [445].) Conversely, when his lack of commitment to his wife rebounds on him and she cheats on him he experiences suffering for the first time; it is as if he had been immune to the experience of passivity until then: ‘He was too staggered even to experience surprise at his unexpected feelings.... He just suffered; and his suffering was such a complete new thing to him that he had no mental apparatus ready with which to deal with it. He was like a man who all his life stalked leopards, suddenly confronted by a charging rhinoceros’ (345). The comparison used by the narrator, who has adopted Wolf’s point of view, underlines the violence of the confrontation, shows how overwhelmed Wolf is by his own passivity and foreshadows his subsequent, even if temporary, ‘complete disintegration of desire and will.’ (351) The words used recall Ricœur’s definition of suffering: ‘[s] uffering is not defined, solely by physical pain, nor even by mental pain, but by the reduction, even the destruction, of the capacity for acting, of being-able-to-act, experienced as a violation of self-integrity’ (Ricœur quoted in Reagan 18).

    12When Wolf finally makes up his mind not to have sex with Christie, he justifies what he sees as his callous last-moment refusal by referring to the face of the man on the Waterloo steps. To his mind, the face warns him against breaking the promise he made to himself, that of always taking the side of Good in the cosmic struggle he sees in the world (‘[The look of this face] has become to me like a sort of conscience, a sort of test for everything I—’ [448]). Thus, in his view, his indelicate and gross behaviour towards Christie is morally-grounded but can it be seen as ethical in Ricœur’s sense? Christie speaks her mind:

    ‘Everything that happens,’ she cried passionately, ‘is only something to be fixed up in your mind. Once you’ve got it arranged there, the whole thing is settled... all is well. What you never seem to realize, for all your talk about ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ is that events are something outside any one person’s mind. Nothing’s finished... until you take in the feelings of everyone concerned!’ (450)

    13The lexical field of fixity (‘fixed up,’ ‘arranged,’ ‘settled,’ ‘all is well’) corroborates Wolf’s notion of individual and fixed identity, which rests on and implies the transformation of the Other into an object and hints at Wolf’s mental paralysis. The phrase in italics, on the contrary, and the suspension points underline Christie’s diametrically-opposed attitude. In spite of Wolf’s self-aggrandising posture in a Manichean world, the flesh-and-blood people who live near him and to whom he makes promises (to Gerda [146]; to Christie [411]) cannot rely on him. In that sense, the man on the Waterloo steps remains an abstract Other whom Wolf uses to justify his own selfishness.

    14What is at stake in the scene with Christie is the necessity of an ethical relationship to the Other to back up one’s self-esteem. Wolf’s decision to fail Christie does not in the end help him save his mythology; it is, in fact, just the opposite probably because of the distinction that exists between morality and ethics. The most fundamental ethical demands exceed the obligations one may have under certain moral codes and depend on a responsible openness to the other. Such an openness is hinted at in Wolf Solent when, quite out of the blue, the only child in the novel asks Wolf the following question in one of the last chapters: ‘Do you think people are always treated as they treat other people?’ (512) Interestingly enough it is a question, not a statement of fact and Wolf is at a loss as to what to answer. I would, however, suggest that Olwen puts her finger on the problem as children often do in Powys’s novels and that the question she asks is the question Wolf should ask himself and answer. In fact, the point being made converges with Ricœur’s distinction between morality and ethics: ‘Let us define ‘ethical intention’ as aiming at the ‘good life’ with and for others, in just institutions’ (Ricœur quoted in Reagan 17). When he develops this idea in Oneself As Another Ricœur refers to the Golden Rule as it can be found in Aristotle, the Bible or Kant (‘Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you’13) and posits the primacy of ethics over morality. The narrative, however, shows how difficult it is for Wolf to come to terms with this phrasing of ethics and responsibility, probably because although Ricœur posits solicitude and ‘benevolent spontaneity,’14 benevolence is not always spontaneous, especially in Wolf’s case.

    15To round off my point I would suggest that the novel shows that ethics has its place within the philosophy of selfhood. Wolf’s position in the world is rocked almost right from the beginning; but it takes him a long time—the whole book in fact—to admit that a non-violative relation to others is linked with a new vision of selfhood. Throughout the novel he alternates between a hardening of the idem-pole of his selfhood (330, 336, 359), and a complete loss of identity (431, 495, 525), in other words between the idealism of Descartes and the nihilism of Nietzsche, that is to say the two extremes Ricœur tried to avoid when he set out to write Oneself As Another. In that sense, Wolf Solent could be compared to a Bildungsroman, since what is clearly at issue throughout the narrative is his sense of identity as it is mediated by his ‘narrative identity’: ‘The notion of a ‘narrative identity’ allows one to think through the question of ‘personal identity’ in a new way, taking into full account the temporal dimension of a being who, by existing with others in the horizon of a common world, is led to transform him (her) self.’15 The identity of the self is a dialectic between ‘sameness’ (idem) and ‘self-constancy’ (ipseity) and Wolf learns that to be faithful to oneself does not mean to be faithful to a promise which you made to yourself and to which you stick inflexibly because it means sameness. In Ricœur’s words,

    Self-constancy is for each person that manner of conducting himself or herself so that others can count on that person. Because someone is counting on me, I am accountable for my actions before another. The term ‘responsibility’ unites both meanings: ‘counting on’ and ‘being accountable for.’ It unites them, adding to them an idea of a response to the question ‘Where are you?’ asked by / another who needs me. The response is the following: ‘Here I am!,’ a response that is a statement of self-constancy.16

    16This has nothing to do either with the binary cosmic struggle between Good and Evil that Wolf arbitrarily envisages in the first chapter, or with the steeled self he posits at first. This has to do with an unfinalised and flexible self which, because of temporal evolution and interaction has to respond to different situations with new initiatives involving new responsibilities and possibilities, which cannot but affect the reader.

    2 The Ethics of Otherness in a Modernist Form17

    17The narrative delineates in detail all the ups and downs of Wolf’s state of mind as regards his relation to others and the conception he has of his identity. Through the use of narrated stream of consciousness the reader is not spared any of Wolf’s hesitations, equivocations, failures and ambiguities. He changes contour and colour all the time and the coercive logic of the narrative is not what matters. For instance less than a page separates these two diametrically-opposed affirmations by Wolf: ‘it was just as if the hard, opaque crystal circle of his inmost identity were, ... turning into something shapeless and nauseating, something that resembled a mass of floating frog-spawn’ (275) and ‘he felt once more that his inmost identity was a hard, round, opaque crystal, which had the power of forcing itself through any substance, organic, inorganic, magnetic, or psychic, that might obstruct its way’ (276). Thus, far from being the coherent entity Wolf thinks he is at the start, he appears to the reader as a self-in-process playing a part in a composite, flexible and mobile network. The narrative destabilises the impression the reader may have formed about Wolf in the first chapter, about the nature of selfhood and about his / her own sense of self. As such Wolf Solent is clearly a modernist novel ‘subject [ing] selfhood to almost infinite variation’ (Rasmussen 63) precisely because of the notion of interaction.

    18The novel, however, does not simply communicate Wolf’s experience; it creates ways of experiencing it. The narrator has restricted his point of view exclusively to that of Wolf—although a lot of dialogues enable the reader to have access to other points of view. Thus how is the openness to the other made possible through the text?

    19In the second third of the novel, once Wolf’s fortified self has started to crack, the text becomes increasingly interspersed with quotations from Shakespeare’s plays, and Keats’s and Wordsworth’s poems (among others). There is also an extract from the novel Christie has embarked on writing (469–470) and three poems (253–255, 360-361, 421-422) written and recited aloud by Jason Otter, one of Wolf’s antagonists in the story. These quotations, whose typographical differences strike the reader, appear as textual figures of alterity. Indeed according to Antoine Compagnon, ‘[t] he quotation is a foreign body in my text because it does not really belong to me’ (my translation).18 The very presence of these quotations incites Wolf and the reader to listen to other voices and to consider alternative attitudes and lives. As for the quotations by famous poets or playwrights, the fact they already haunt Wolf himself reduces to naught his claim of being a self-enclosed individual.

    20Jason’s first poem resists Wolf’s interpretation, which is in keeping with the discourse of the ruling culture and its tendency to reduce otherness to sameness. Wolf naturally assumes the heterosexuality of the two personae of the poem: a slow-worm and a rain-elf. Jason refutes Wolf’s assumptions: ‘[the rain-elf] wasn’t a girl’ (255). Thus Wolf’s interpretation is exposed as static and as such it cannot allow him to meet the text and be a responsible listener; he appears to be unable to let his ego divest itself of itself. Moreover, the reader probably finds himself guilty of the same deeply entrenched views as Wolf and feels chastised even if it is in a very indirect way by Jason’s bland comment. At first Wolf’s refusal (and the reader’s) to accept otherness means he is a faulty reader; he is not ready to make ‘an effort to do justice to the singularity of the other and to suspend habitual modes of thinking and feeling in order to be able to do this’ (Attridge 2004, 83). Progressively however, the confrontation of Wolf and Jason’s poems becomes less tense and in the case of the last poem, Wolf simply lets himself be submerged not by the meaning as such of the poem, which is obscure, but by its singularities as a literary text; he is then both active and passive.

    21Since Jason’s texts are poems he recites aloud to Wolf and since Christie’s text is, in my opinion, a pastiche of Dorothy Richardson’s typical modernist style,19 whose ‘distinct affinity with poetry’ Powys himself underlined,20 these insertions also prompt Wolf and the reader to pay particular attention to and at the same time to be surprised by what they tend to forget when they are carried away by the syntagmatic unfolding of a text, namely its metaphors and figures of speech but also its alliteration, rhythms and silences, or to quote Dorothy Richardson herself, ‘the shape and the sounds of the sentences.’21 This material otherness of any literary text which cannot be subsumed into its meaning (‘cet hétérogène au sens et à la signification’ to quote Julia Kristeva22) was a typical modernist concern exemplifying ‘the ethical force of literature,’ as Derek Attridge sums up clearly:

    Modernism’s foregrounding of language and other discursive and generic codes through its formal strategies is not merely a self-reflexive diversion but a recognition that literature’s distinctive power and potential ethical force resides in a testing and unsettling of deeply held assumptions of transparency, instrumentality, and direct referentiality, in part because this taking to the limits opens a space for the apprehension of the otherness which those assumptions had silently excluded.
    (Attridge 2005, 15)

    22In the same vein, when Wolf asks Jason what he means ‘by the last verse’ (363) of the second poem, Jason replies: ‘It’s not my business to explain what I mean, ... It’s my business to write.’ (363) Jason does not consider his poem as a static object ‘walled-up in itself’ (Attridge 2004, 66). Neither does he give precedence to the author: he recedes into the background and hints at the impossibility of adhering to a strictly individualistic conception of artistic subjectivity, which is also suggested by the inclusion of all the quotations referred to earlier on. Jason does not provide Wolf and the reader with any guidance. What matters is the text itself and each inventive response to it. Thanks to the anaphora it is based on, Jason’s answer puts the emphasis on the one hand on the writing process (‘It’s my business to write’) and on the other hand on the reading process. The first part of his sentence may imply that it is the business of all the readers of his poetry (or listeners) to collaborate in its meaning provided they leave behind them the assumptions they may have been guilty of in the case of the first poem, in other words provided they prove themselves to be responsible readers in more sense than one. This other typically modernist idea is summed up once again by Derek Attridge:

    [I] it is only when the event of this reformulation is experienced by the reader... as an event, an event which opens new possibilities of meaning and feeling (understood as verbs), or more accurately, the event of such opening, that we speak of the literary... This is what a literary work ‘is’: an act, an event, of reading, never entirely separable from the act-event (or act-events) of writing that brought it into being as a potentially readable text, never entirely insulated from the contingencies of the history into which it is projected and within which it is read. (Attridge 2004, 59)

    23Jason’s answer can also be interpreted as a meta-fictional comment on the narrator of Wolf Solent. Having restricted his point of view to Wolf’s own, he hardly ever comments on any of the character’s moves or on his frequent indecision. Never does he guide the reader, who is left to make the difficult judgements or not and to collaborate with the text. Wolf can be arrogant, priggish, snobbish, kind-hearted, libidinous or well-meaning but the reader is never told what to think or how to interpret such behaviour. This absence of closure means the text remains open, a characteristic which can also be felt on the last page of the novel.

    24It could hardly be less open and more incomplete. The narrator does not round off the narrative with a summary of Wolf’s future life in Dorset or on the contrary with his death (unlike what Powys had done in the four novels he wrote before Wolf Solent). As for the fact that Wolf is on the threshold of his house (‘he laid his hand on the latch of his gate’ [614]), it is yet another sign that his identity is unfinalised. The last page even ends with the possibility of another disagreeable encounter for Wolf and with a decision which is full of bathos, for the last sentence of this six-hundred-page-long novel runs as follows: ‘Well, I shall have a cup of tea’ (614), a promise he will probably honour but which is likely to leave the reader staggered and bewildered.

    25Even if Wolf has difficulty grasping all that the face of the man on the Waterloo steps implies, probably because he first transforms it into a kind of test for his own set of values, it is noteworthy that the face, which is the epitome of the other, is introduced right from the start, as if otherness itself was what made a story and writing a story possible. Wolf learns in a painful way that his fictional vision of himself based on sameness of character and on a black and white vision of the world is irrelevant. He is not a static, self-confined being; his ‘narrative identity’ entails his being responsible for the other. Neither is the eponymous novel a fixed, self-enclosed text. On the contrary, once the text is written, it is reactivated by the reader in the very act of reading, which is precisely what Ricœur’s hermeneutics is all about. Thus we can follow Derek Attridge’s conclusion when he writes: ‘To be responsible for the other as it comes into being is to be under an obligation to it; to respond responsibly to the otherness of a literary work is to do justice to it; treating literature as literature means being hospitable and generous’ (Attridge 2004, 126). In the subsequent novels Powys wrote, he was to draw all the consequences to the questions the writing of Wolf Solent had triggered off and to start writing polyphonic novels, leaving behind him once and for all the bourgeois notions of individual and fixed identity and the omniscient narrator of the realistic century. Thus in that respect Wolf Solent is clearly a landmark in Powys’s development as a fully-fledged modernist novelist.

    Notes de bas de page

    1 John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent (1929; New York: Vintage Books, 1998) 115.

    2 It is both a ‘sensation’ (8) and ‘an arrogant mental idea—the idea, namely, that he was taking part in some occult cosmic struggle—some struggle between what he liked to think of as “good” and what he liked to think of as “evil”’ (8). It is a personal fantasy based on a manichean vision of the world which has a deontological dimension.

    3 John van den Hengel, ‘Can There Be a Science of Action?’ Ricœur as Another. The Ethics of Subjectivity, eds Richard Cohen and James Marsh (New York: New York Press, 2002) 86.

    4 David Pellauer, Ricœur. A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2007) 90.

    5 Paul Ricœur, Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990)

    6 Charles Reagan, ‘Personal Identity,’ Cohen and Marsh 3.32, 16.

    7 It would no doubt be possible to discuss Wolf Solent in terms of Levinas’s engagement with the notion of the face of the other. I have, however, decided to focus on Ricœur’s theories because they seem particularly illuminating as far as Wolf’s relationships with the other characters are concerned without having to tackle the notion of transcendence. Besides, one of the last essays written on Wolf Solent revolves around the centrality of the Waterloo face although there is no explicit reference to Levinas’s work. See H.W. Fawkner, John Cowper Powys and the Soul (The Powys Society, 2010).

    8 The third manifestation of passivity is the following one: ‘Finally, we have the most deeply hidden passivity, that of the relation of the self to itself, which is conscience’ (Reagan 28).

    9 Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004) 126, 130.

    10 A lot of articles have been devoted to Wolf Solent and in particular to the development of the main protagonist, but so far as I know Ricœur’s theories have never been used to illuminate some elements of the text. What is more, most of the articles fail to show the link between the evolution of the eponymous character and the literary strategies used by Powys. In particular, the ethical hermeneutics suggested by the novel for its readers has not really been enlarged on in that respect although it is a valuable argument to prove Powys’s modernism.

    11 David Rasmussen, ‘Rethinking Subjectivity: Narrative Identity and the Self’ (Cohen and Marsh 57–60, 60).

    12 Lenore Langsdorf, ‘The Doubleness of Subjectivity: Regenerating the Phenomenology of Intentionality’ (Cohen and Marsh 33–56, 35).

    13 James Marsh, ‘The Right and the Good: A Solution to the Communicative Ethics Controversy’ (Cohen and Marsh 223–234, 227).

    14 Ricœur quoted in Patrick Bourgeois, ‘Ricœur and Levinas: Solicitude in Reciprocity and Solitude in Existence’ (Cohen and Marsh 109–126, 119).

    15 Maria Villela-Petit, “Narrative Identity and Ipseity by Paul Ricœur”, Online Originals 2010, 3; www.onlineoriginals.com/showitem.asp?itemID=287&articleID=11

    16 Ricœur quoted in Karl Simms, Paul Ricœur (London: Routledge, 2002) 107.

    17 I have borrowed this title from Derek Attridge, who entitled one of the chapters of his book on Coetzee, ‘Modernist Form and the Ethics of Otherness’. Derek Attridge, J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

    18 Antoine Compagnon, La seconde main ou le travail de la citation (Paris: Seuil, 1979) 31: ‘La citation est un corps étranger dans mon texte, parce qu’elle ne m’appartient pas en propre.’

    19 Florence Marie-Laverrou, ‘John Cowper Powys dans le contexte moderniste: le hors-texte au cœur du texte,’ Études britanniques contemporaines 31 (juin 2006): 41–54.

    20 John Cowper Powys, Dorothy Richardson (London: Joiner and Steele, 1931) 44.

    21 Dorothy Richardson, Deadlock (1921; London: Virago Press, 2002) 119.

    22 Julia Kristeva, Polylogue (Paris: Seuil, 1977) 158.

    Auteur

    • Florence Marie-Laverrou

      University of Pau et les Pays de l’Adour

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    Ethics of Alterity, Confrontation and Responsibility in 19th- to 21st-Century British literature

    Jean-Michel Ganteau et Christine Reynier (dir.)

    2013

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    1 John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent (1929; New York: Vintage Books, 1998) 115.

    2 It is both a ‘sensation’ (8) and ‘an arrogant mental idea—the idea, namely, that he was taking part in some occult cosmic struggle—some struggle between what he liked to think of as “good” and what he liked to think of as “evil”’ (8). It is a personal fantasy based on a manichean vision of the world which has a deontological dimension.

    3 John van den Hengel, ‘Can There Be a Science of Action?’ Ricœur as Another. The Ethics of Subjectivity, eds Richard Cohen and James Marsh (New York: New York Press, 2002) 86.

    4 David Pellauer, Ricœur. A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2007) 90.

    5 Paul Ricœur, Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990)

    6 Charles Reagan, ‘Personal Identity,’ Cohen and Marsh 3.32, 16.

    7 It would no doubt be possible to discuss Wolf Solent in terms of Levinas’s engagement with the notion of the face of the other. I have, however, decided to focus on Ricœur’s theories because they seem particularly illuminating as far as Wolf’s relationships with the other characters are concerned without having to tackle the notion of transcendence. Besides, one of the last essays written on Wolf Solent revolves around the centrality of the Waterloo face although there is no explicit reference to Levinas’s work. See H.W. Fawkner, John Cowper Powys and the Soul (The Powys Society, 2010).

    8 The third manifestation of passivity is the following one: ‘Finally, we have the most deeply hidden passivity, that of the relation of the self to itself, which is conscience’ (Reagan 28).

    9 Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004) 126, 130.

    10 A lot of articles have been devoted to Wolf Solent and in particular to the development of the main protagonist, but so far as I know Ricœur’s theories have never been used to illuminate some elements of the text. What is more, most of the articles fail to show the link between the evolution of the eponymous character and the literary strategies used by Powys. In particular, the ethical hermeneutics suggested by the novel for its readers has not really been enlarged on in that respect although it is a valuable argument to prove Powys’s modernism.

    11 David Rasmussen, ‘Rethinking Subjectivity: Narrative Identity and the Self’ (Cohen and Marsh 57–60, 60).

    12 Lenore Langsdorf, ‘The Doubleness of Subjectivity: Regenerating the Phenomenology of Intentionality’ (Cohen and Marsh 33–56, 35).

    13 James Marsh, ‘The Right and the Good: A Solution to the Communicative Ethics Controversy’ (Cohen and Marsh 223–234, 227).

    14 Ricœur quoted in Patrick Bourgeois, ‘Ricœur and Levinas: Solicitude in Reciprocity and Solitude in Existence’ (Cohen and Marsh 109–126, 119).

    15 Maria Villela-Petit, “Narrative Identity and Ipseity by Paul Ricœur”, Online Originals 2010, 3; www.onlineoriginals.com/showitem.asp?itemID=287&articleID=11

    16 Ricœur quoted in Karl Simms, Paul Ricœur (London: Routledge, 2002) 107.

    17 I have borrowed this title from Derek Attridge, who entitled one of the chapters of his book on Coetzee, ‘Modernist Form and the Ethics of Otherness’. Derek Attridge, J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

    18 Antoine Compagnon, La seconde main ou le travail de la citation (Paris: Seuil, 1979) 31: ‘La citation est un corps étranger dans mon texte, parce qu’elle ne m’appartient pas en propre.’

    19 Florence Marie-Laverrou, ‘John Cowper Powys dans le contexte moderniste: le hors-texte au cœur du texte,’ Études britanniques contemporaines 31 (juin 2006): 41–54.

    20 John Cowper Powys, Dorothy Richardson (London: Joiner and Steele, 1931) 44.

    21 Dorothy Richardson, Deadlock (1921; London: Virago Press, 2002) 119.

    22 Julia Kristeva, Polylogue (Paris: Seuil, 1977) 158.

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    Marie-Laverrou, F. (2013). The Relation to the Other in John Cowper Powys’s Wolf Solent (1929). In J.-M. Ganteau & C. Reynier (éds.), Ethics of Alterity, Confrontation and Responsibility in 19th- to 21st-Century British literature (1‑). Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pulm.9785
    Marie-Laverrou, Florence. « The Relation to the Other in John Cowper Powys’s Wolf Solent (1929) ». In Ethics of Alterity, Confrontation and Responsibility in 19th- to 21st-Century British Literature, édité par Jean-Michel Ganteau et Christine Reynier. Montpellier: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2013. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pulm.9785.
    Marie-Laverrou, Florence. « The Relation to the Other in John Cowper Powys’s Wolf Solent (1929) ». Ethics of Alterity, Confrontation and Responsibility in 19th- to 21st-Century British Literature, édité par Jean-Michel Ganteau et Christine Reynier, Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2013, https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pulm.9785.

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    Ganteau, J.-M., & Reynier, C. (éds.). (2013). Ethics of Alterity, Confrontation and Responsibility in 19th- to 21st-Century British literature (1‑). Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pulm.9645
    Ganteau, Jean-Michel, et Christine Reynier, éd. Ethics of Alterity, Confrontation and Responsibility in 19th- to 21st-Century British Literature. Montpellier: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2013. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pulm.9645.
    Ganteau, Jean-Michel, et Christine Reynier, éditeurs. Ethics of Alterity, Confrontation and Responsibility in 19th- to 21st-Century British Literature. Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2013, https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pulm.9645.
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