Literature and Ethics: Questions of Responsibility in Literary St ...

authenticity or merely verisimilitude. A variation of this is explored by Neil Murphy via his elucidation of what he argues is an alternative tradition in Irish writing, a tradition that refuses the principles of authenticity and verisimilitude, and which extends from Berkeley, Swift, and Burke, to John Banville, Sebastian Barry, and Robert McLiam Wilson.

Authors, to be sure, have many ways of evading responsibility. But even accounts that seem the most effortful and sincere product of a desire to act responsibly can fall short of the mark. This apparent failure is not merely due to difficulties posed by the always-conflicting demands of history, the reader, and literary art itself. Even in cases where the author himself becomes the object of the literary endeavor, responsibility is a challenge. In a refreshingly honest and responsible “confession” in the first autobiographical part of “A Question of Responsibility and a Matter of Form: V. S. Naipaul’s A Way in the World”, Shirley Chew announces, as in the form of a general law, that the autobiographical mode itself is always contaminated, so to speak, by half-truth, or by invention. It is for this reason that the classic examples of autobiographical confession, even the apparently most forthright ones, such as Augustine’s and Rousseau’s, so readily lend themselves to literary study and are in fact works of fiction. By the same token, the more obvious cases of fictional narrative can always also partake of the autobiographical mode. Terence Dawson examines a telling example here in his “Irresponsibility and Self-Knowledge: Mansfield Park as Bildungsroman, Satire, and Confessional Novel”, Augustine and Rousseau both advance one of the most traditional and consistently maintained understandings of ethical responsibility in assuming its dependence on true self-knowledge, and it is this relationship between responsibility and self-knowledge that Dawson explores in his reading of Austen. Again Rousseau and Augustine provide the traditional measures of the difficulties entailed in the construction of reliable memoirs. The ideal of self-knowledge is especially difficult to realise when the self being explored is the child the author claims once to have been, and now to remember. For this collection, Sarah O’Mahony reflects on similar difficulties in two recent memoirs, J. M. Coetzee’s Boyhood and Jill Ker Conway’s The Road from Coorain, noting that