in the text.
32
T H E O R Y
in the experience o f those whose privacy rights they deny and fail to treat
the events as something that might happen to someone one could know
or even be. (The police burst into the house o f a gay man and into his
bedroom, where he and his partner were making love.) The texts of these
opinions work to keep the human story at a distance, remarking sardoni
cally on “the claimed constitutional right o f homosexuals to engage in acts
of sodomy.” Nussbaum writes that the model of literary judging would
have entailed consideration o f a more detailed, empathetic and concrete
sort (such as would have been necessary to adjudicating Bowers as an equal
protection case). The literary judge, she concludes, “has a better grasp of
the totality of the facts than the nonlherary judge. . . . Literary judging is
by no means sufficient for good judging, . . . but we should demand it in
appropriate circumstances, whatever else we also demand” {PJ, ii8).
In a second line o f argument Nussbaum claims— against Knapp—
that literature works toward social justice in one particular sense: it is an
equalizer. Whitman writes o f the poet:
He is the equalizer of his age and land.
He judges not as the judge judges but as the sun falling round a helpless thing
He sees eternity in men and women, he does not see men and women as dreams
or dots.”
What does it mean to call literature equalizing? The concern for the dis
advantaged is built into the structure of the literary experience, Nussbaum
claims, as it leads the reader to enter vicariously into the concrete circum
stances o f other lives {PJ, 87). Literature draws attenrion to misery and
focuses our attention on the individual, treating characters not as dreams
or dots or statistics but as figures in whose experience and vision it may
be possible to participate. The novel-reading stance, she concludes, citing
E. M. Forster’s Maurice, calls out for political and social equality as the
necessary condition for full humanity for citizens on both sides o f “the
li n e ” (Р /, 9 7 ).
This is no doubt an excessively optimistic reading o f literature— o f
the literary relation— but I cite it as an instance o f what seems to me a gen
ii. Walt Whitman, “By Blue Ontario’s Shore” (
11
. 142, 148, 153), in The
’ Poems, ed. Francis Murphy (Harmondsworth; Penguin, 1975), 368-69.
eral tendency in recent theory: to locate the distinctive features o f litera
ture not in particular qualities o f language or framings o f language but in
the staging o f agency and in the relation to otherness into which readers o f
literature are brought. Nussbaum stresses above all the ways in which liter
ary works bring readers to see characters as individuals, in the sense o f indi
vidual people one might know, but arguably literature undercuts this con
cept o f the individual. The effects o f literature here depend on the special
structure o f exemplarity in literature— an issue she does not address.
A literary work, whether Hamlet or Maurice, is typically the story of
a fictional character, but to read it as literature is to take it as in some way
exemplary. W hy else would one read it? It presents itself as exemplary but
simultaneously declines to define the range or scope o f that exemplarity. A
literary work is more than an anecdote, a singular example that is offered as
an instance o f something (though a detailed and well-told anecdote can ac
cede to the condition o f literariness). The literary representation has great
er autonomy, so the question o f what it exemplifies can be left in abeyance
at the same time that that question subtends the significance of the rep
resentation. This is why through the years people have often been led to
speak o f the “universality” o f literature. The structure o f literary works is
such that it is easier to take them as telling us about the human condition
in general than to specify some narrower category they describe or illumi
nate. Is Hamlet ]\xst about princes, or men o f the Renaissance, or introspec
tive young men, or people whose fathers have died in obscure circumstanc
es? Since all such answers seem unsatisfactory, it is easier for readers not to
answer, thus implicitly accepting a possibility o f universality. Novels, po
ems, and plays, in their singularity, decline to explore what they are exem
plary o f at the same time that they invite their readers to become involved
in the predicaments and the consciousness o f narrators and characters who
are in some sense posited as exemplary. And of course while readers have
the option o f declining to decide what is exemplified by a particular liter
ary example, what Nussbaum calls “the literary judge” must decide, if he or
she is to profit from the thick description that the literarily described case
offers, for the legal judgment is always typifying in effect. It makes law,
through the particular features it chooses to cite as determining; “when x
and jy occur, a right o f privacy should obtain.”
This structure o f exemplarity has been important to the relationship
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