"'Modern critics…have become oddly resistant to admitting that there is more than one code of..."

“'Modern critics…have become oddly resistant to admitting that there is more than one code of morals in the world, whereas the central purpose of reading imaginative literature is to accustom yourself to this basic fact' since 'to understand codes other than your own is likely to make your judgments better.' Williams Empson's formulation, as he seems to have recognized, places the central ethical work of literature largely in prose fiction (and perhaps in the feature film). Modern poetry, unless it rejects Empson's liberalism entirely, then gets to answer the question: what else can imaginative writing do?”

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from “Without Evidence,” by Stephen Burt (from Close Calls with Nonsense). On one hand, Burt uses Empson to address what I always find fascinating about literature. How does it so possess its reader that the person believes he or she has actually lived the life of this other character, and thus understood that person’s life? At the reader’s peril, of course. For some reason Toni Morrison’s Jazz is the first book that comes to mind. The odd, but understandable morality that I want to empathize with and condemn at the same time.

On the other hand, Burt opens up the strange, elaborate and odd priorities that might attend “imaginative writing.” And though there are any number of applications for this, I imagine the complex role of the lyric, how the lyric voice might inhabit the reader, or keep the reader in a set place, or contort the reader’s imagination. And for what purpose? 

How spectacular to discover there is a world beyond moralistic priorities!!