ABSTRACT
By textual ethics I mean the perseverant and transformative performance of texts in and on those who produce and consume them, and the relative openness of readers and writers to transformation. Textual ethics, then, examines the way texts act and how their efficacy may be embraced or resisted by readers. I am, therefore, concerned with two distinct but related ethical moments with respect to textual agency. On the side of reading: the well worn thought that reading might be a transforming experience, constituted as and resulting in an ethical choice. On the side of writing: the willingness of an author to submit himself or herself to the logic of his or her text and to follow its tropes and schemes to places unanticipated by authorial intention. Taken together these processes make up two sides of the same ethical coin. The features that lend to a text whatever transforming power it may have emerge in the course of the writer’s more or less intrepid collaboration with his or her medium, genre and material and the reader’s willingness to engage in a similar collaboration with the resulting text. For both reader and writer openness to the ethical moment of the text means understanding the rhetorical and linguistic material from which the text is fashioned as a third term, distinct from reader and writer, yet irreducibly implicated in the potential agency of the text. This agency inheres in the text’s ability to discover a plurality of universes by configuring and reconfiguring the possible relationships among its signifying elements.3 Varied configurations result from choices made among possible ways a text may be
construed, and they result in further choices when they project the reader or writer into various delineated situations. Aristotle understood this when he made e¯thos subordinate to mythos. The plot offers the protagonist choices. These choices disclose the customs or habits that determine his character. As we read, the unfolding of the plot appears to be determined by the character’s choices; the character-effect is thus metaleptic. From the point of view of the writing, character is caused by plot, which is then represented as an effect of character.4 My agenda in this essay is to propose a version of psychoanalytic transference as a way to detail how readers and writers encounter ethical choices and how the choices they make not only disclose but also determine character. In the latter part of the essay, I hope to demonstrate the efficacy of the model by bringing it to bear on a curious detail of the presentation of Samson Agonistes in Milton’s 1671 volume.
