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

divine law of the family, say, or the human law of the state—who “do not choose but … are what they will and accomplish” (1214), claims all the same that “no worse insult could be given to such a hero than to say that he acted innocently”, and adds that “it is the honour of these great characters to be culpable” (1215). Apparently convinced of the reality of fate, the Greeks nonetheless gave us heroes such as Oedipus and Antigone who are proud of their guilt. Schelling adopts the same paradoxical—indeed dialectical—solution of the problem of Greek tragedy: the very punishment of Oedipus, which presupposes his guilt, becomes the mode of paying tribute to the freedom of a hero who fights against an external power to which he necessarily succumbs (192–193). Such a will to freedom in defiance of reality is not that far from preferring not to take tea with a guiltless murderer.

Although fate and destiny, then, are potent forces in literature, poets have always been ready to contemplate the possibility that character—ethos—is still, somehow, destiny. Not genes, not probability waves, but ethos. Macbeth calls fate into the lists, and despite the incontrovertible evidence of his inevitable doom, fights against his destiny until he perishes under its weight, as though he himself were responsible. Phaedra is ambiguously guilty, stresses Racine in his preface, while Hippolytus, in the same play, pursues interdicted love at the expense of duties—such as training his unruly horses—that might have saved him from his doom, and so is at least “slightly guilty” (Racine 4). Doubtless, literature would not exist without the idea of responsibility, the idea of an Oedipus or a Macbeth or a Hippolytus, or even, for that matter, of someone standing at a fork in the road with a real decision to make. (Who knows what the poet would say to the modern physicist who tells him that there is no road not taken!) And it may also be true that humans could not exist without this idea. We are responsible human beings, and so potentially irresponsible human beings, or we are nothing—at least nothing to celebrate or censure in poetry.

The freedom and ability really to act responsibly, or indeed demonstrably irresponsibly, is as necessary for the idea of human dignity as it is for civilisation itself, which is also the point of my epigraph at the