**Attention, Representation, and Unsettlement in Katherena Vermette's** *The Break***, or, Teaching and (Re)Learning the Ethics of Reading**

#### **Cynthia R. Wallace**

Department of English, St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK S7N 0W6, Canada; cwallace@stmcollege.ca

Received: 24 July 2019; Accepted: 11 October 2019; Published: 16 October 2019

**Abstract:** Theories of literary ethics often emphasize either content or the structural relationship between text and reader, and they tend to bracket pedagogy. This essay advocates instead for an approach that sees literary representation and readerly attention as interanimating and that considers teaching an important aspect of an ethics of reading. To support these positions, I turn to Katherena Vermette's 2016 novel *The Break*, which both represents the urgent injustice of sexualized violence against Indigenous women and girls and also metafictionally comments on the ethics of witnessing. Describing how I read with my students the novel's insistent thematization of face-to-face encounters and practices of attention as an invitation to read with Emmanuel Levinas and Simone Weil, I explicate the text's self-aware commentary on *both* the need for readers to resist self-enlargement in their encounters with others' stories and also the danger of generalizing readerly responsibility or losing sight of the material realities the text represents. I source these challenges both in the novel and in my students' multiple particularities as readers facing the textual other. Ultimately, the essay argues for a more careful attention to which works we bring into our theorizing of literary ethics, and which theoretical frames we bring into classroom conversations.

**Keywords:** ethics; attention; representation; responsibility; decoloniality; indigenous writers; gendered violence; Levinas; Weil; pedagogy

Katherena Vermette (2016) novel *The Break* begins with the land. A mysterious first-person voice explains "the Break" as a "piece of land just west of McPhillips Street", a narrow field about four lots wide that interrupts all the closely knit houses" and holds the hydroelectric towers and wires that run through the city (3). The speaker explains the history of the land, how it "was likely set aside" when "all that low land on the west side of the Red River was only tall grasses and rabbits" (3), how houses were eventually built around it on lots just small enough to deny the Eastern European immigrant inhabitants voting rights, how in the 1960s Indigenous folks "started moving in, once Status Indians could leave reserves", and how now it is a neighbourhood full of both "big families, good people", and also "gangs, hookers, drug houses" (4). Thus contextualizing in time and place, these opening three pages also allude to "my Stella", one of the novel's central characters, and "everything she's been through" and to how it was snowing "when it happened" (5). The foreshadowing is foreboding, but the tone here is gentle, the voice a sort of knowledgeable welcome.

As I read the novel when it was first published, I suspected it would teach well. So far it has, in a first-year composition course, a second-year interdisciplinary course on social justice and the common good, and a graduate seminar on literary ethics. Part of the resonance derives from the novel's representation of places and people familiar to my students at the University of Saskatchewan; the setting is Winnipeg's North End, the characters mostly Métis. The novel's central conflict is the rape of a young woman, Emily, the police investigation of who is responsible, and a large cast of characters' attempts to care for each other and themselves in the wake of great wrong. While this content is

difficult (I include a trigger warning in class and on the syllabus and offer an alternative assignment) it also lends to the novel an underlying urgency to which most of my students respond very favourably.

*Formally*, however, I think students find the novel compelling in part because it is a bit of a whodunit.1 After the mysteriously voiced introduction, the narrative opens with a scene of police questioning Stella, the witness of the crime, at her kitchen table. From there, the chapters skip around in time and place and are focalized through different characters. It is up to readers to put the pieces of these relations together, and to work alongside Tommy the police detective to figure out who perpetrated the assault. Because of both the unfolding mystery and the character-driven narration that invites emotional investment, students report that the book is hard to put down.<sup>2</sup>

The pleasure provoked by the page-turning mystery sets up a familiar tension between aesthetic enjoyment and ethical engagement. What does it mean to find satisfaction in reading a story about a character's violent assault? What does it mean to render in compelling prose a reality—the grossly disproportionate violence against Indigenous women—so prevalent that the Canadian government in 2016 commissioned an official inquiry into the crisis (National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls 2019)? How do we grapple with questions of mimesis and verisimilitude as we approach a text undeniably *about* a human experience so ethically and politically urgent?

Yet *The Break* is not a guilty bystander in these debates about ethics and aesthetics but a theorizing participant, for the novel is self-aware in this regard. This awareness manifests especially in the character Tommy, the keen young police investigator, who serves as a double for the reader, both exemplifying the need to pay careful, minute attention to another's story and also exposing the problem of finding pleasure in piecing together the parts in order to solve the crime. This, I argue, is one element of the text's ethics, which together with its insistent thematizing of face-to-face encounters and responsibility resonates with a great deal of the theorizing of literary ethics done over the last three decades. Through Tommy's metafictional exemplification of the dangers of using someone else's story for one's own pleasure and the text's insistent commentary on the power of *attending* to a suffering other, the novel suggests an ethics of reading that resists mastery, self-aggrandizement, and ultimately colonization while instead inviting self-suspending attention and being-for-the-other. In other words, Tommy's problematized role in the mystery plot seems to replicate an ethics of reading literary scholars developed in the 1990s, largely in conversation with the work of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas.

However conveniently such an interpretation aligns with much of the discourse of literary ethics, though, Vermette's novel both offers and undermines this ethics of reading through another character who may also act as a double for readers and a foil for Tommy—Stella, the witness to the rape. If Tommy can be read as The Reader of Western philosophy, furiously scribbling and rescribbling his notes and nearly laughing out loud with joy when he discovers more details of the crime, Stella stands for readers who find themselves responsible in the act of witnessing a suffering other yet in the particularity of their own position find this responsibility an impossible burden. In other words, the novel's ethics of reading is double-edged, implying *both* the critique of readerly mastery derived from Levinas (and, I add here, Simone Weil's celebration of self-giving attention) and *also* the risk of a generalized ethics of reading that assumes all readers are powerful subjects to begin with and that Western philosophy offers universally helpful conceptualizations. Ultimately, *The Break* reminds us not only that *how* we read, or what I have called elsewhere an ethics of readerly attention, but also *what* we read, or the ethics of literary representation, matters a great deal in questions of literary ethics. Even more crucially, *which texts we bring into our theorizing* of literary ethics makes all the difference in the world, a point we would do well to remember as the conversation continues.

<sup>1</sup> In fact, in addition to being an Amnesty International Book Club selection, the novel was also a *Sunday Times* Crime Book of the Month in February 2018.

<sup>2</sup> It may not be common practice to discuss pedagogy in scholarship theorizing literary ethics, but I am increasingly suspicious of this division, particularly given the importance of context and community for our reading practices. In this essay I will weave my own close reading of the text with accounts of classroom discussion.

#### **1. Theorizing**

Scholars have devoted significant effort to mapping the so-called ethical turn in literary studies that gained momentum at the end of the twentieth century (see Buell 1999; Gibson 2005; Eskin 2004; Eaglestone 2004). Many of these mappings share a sense of the tension between two main tendencies: one emphasizes literature's content, its capacity for complexity and the "particular" (Nussbaum 1990, p. 37), its implied authors (Booth 1988), and its ethical and political representations. Andrew Gibson (2005) calls this strand "Moral Criticism", and Lawrence Buell (1999) associates it with the tradition of Matthew Arnold and F.R. Leavis, philosophers like Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty, and also multiculturalism (7–8). Moral Criticism is concerned with representational content, with what readers' encounters with narrated characters and situations can change in them, a concern I see extended in more recent reconsiderations of empathy on the part of literary scholars like Suzanne Keen (2007) in *Empathy and the Novel* and both cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists turning to literature.<sup>3</sup>

Another strand, which Gibson terms "the New Ethical Criticism",4 has tended to focus less on literature's content and more on readers' relationship to the text. This strand emphasizes vocabularies of "*alterity, interpellation, call of the other, answerability, ethical responsibility, openness, obligation, event, doing justice, witnessing, hospitality, singularity, particularity,* or *the gift"* (Eskin 2004, p. 561). It draws, as Buell notes, on deconstruction and Continental philosophy more broadly, perhaps most importantly on the metaethics of Emmanuel Levinas (8–11). Levinas' influence is notable in the vocabularies of responsibility and face-to-face encounter that permeate much of the New Ethical Criticism in the 1990s and early 2000s.<sup>5</sup> Famously hyperbolic, Levinas [1957] (1993) writes of the way encountering an other's face confronts the self with an endless responsibility for that other; the other's vulnerable gaze "opens the very dimension of the infinite, of what puts a stop to the irresistible imperialism of the Same and the I" (110). Levinas begins his philosophy with this face-to-face encounter, insisting that "Justice well ordered begins with the Other" (112).

Doris Sommer (1994) exemplifies a common mode of appealing to Levinas when she turns to him in her essay "Resistant Texts and Incompetent Readers" to help her discuss how certain literary forms resist readers' propensity "to reduce otherness to sameness" (534; cf. Levinas [1957] 1993, p. 91). The point here is not modeled by two characters' relationship to each other but by the aesthetic characteristics that shape the relating of text and reader. Indeed, for all its emphasis on otherness, much of the New Ethical Criticism is effectively a structural ethics of reading; it describes (and at points prescribes) the relationship of a reader to a text. Derek Attridge (2004) book *The Singularity of Literature* perhaps most explicitly highlights this tendency, as does his contribution to the 1999 *PMLA* issue in which he writes, "Reading involves working against the mind's tendency to assimilate the other to the same, attending to that which can barely be heard, registering what is unique about the shaping of language, thought, and feeling in a particular work" (25). Reading thus leads to responsibility, Attridge (1999) claims: "Responsibility for the other involves assuming the other's needs, being willing to be called to account for the other, surrendering one's goals and desires in deference to the other's" (27). Again, Attridge draws on Levinas here not to describe the relation of two people but of a reader faced with a text.

While we may be two decades on from the heyday of the New Ethical Criticism, Levinas' influence continues apace, as do theories of the ethics of reading.6 Many of these literary critical appeals to Levinas continue to blithely overlook the complexities introduced by both his philosophy's imbrication with Judaism and by feminist philosophers' criticisms of his gender-talk. In other words, as Adam

<sup>3</sup> I am thinking here, for example, of Hakemulder (2000); Iacoboni (2011); Koopman (2015); and Oatley (2016).

<sup>4</sup> Robert Eaglestone (2004) also divides the field into two but calls the two sides "wings": "roughly, a more narrative-based neo-Aristotelian 'wing' and a more deconstructive 'wing'" (595).

<sup>5</sup> Early book-length studies of Levinas and literary ethics include Newton (1995); Eaglestone (1997); Robbins (1999); Gibson (1999).

<sup>6</sup> More recent examples include Hale (2009); Hughes (2010); Wehrs (2013); Attridge (2015); and Wallace (2016).

Zachary Newton (2001) argues, to do justice to Levinas means attending to the sum total of his writing, recognizing the way his philosophical and religious work are interanimating. Likewise, to do justice to the sum total of *humanity* means recognizing with Gayatri Spivak (1992) that for Levinas, the "subject-ship of ethics is certainly male" (76).<sup>7</sup> As I argue in *Of Women Borne: A Literary Ethics of Su*ff*ering* (2016), when literary scholars deracinate Levinas' writings on ethics from both his Jewish context and writings *and* the discursive context of feminist philosophers' critique of his assumptions of male subjects and feminine passivity, we risk undermining the very efforts we make to be responsible. This elision of religion and gender matters, I argue, because so much of the vocabulary of passivity and limitless responsibility for another that literary scholars derive from Levinas rings with echoes of western norms of feminine self-giving care, which are themselves rooted in certain biblical traditions. As Erin Biviano (2007) and others argue, to borrow from Levinas without the accompanying critique risks relegating the vulnerable to a position of greater vulnerability. Further, as I argue throughout this essay, to theorize a universal paradigm of reading carries with it risks of generalizing the experience of those already in power.

At the same time, my own sense is that we need an ethics of reading—a description and prescription of *how one ought to read—*now more than ever, in a world even more technologically mediated than Zygmunt Bauman (1993) imagined 25 years ago in *Postmodern Ethics*, when he asserted that the "moral self-awareness is the most evident and most prominent among technology's victims" (198). As J. Hillis Miller (1987) warned in *The Ethics of Reading*, "the attractions of inattention are immense" (3), and as so-called "attention merchants" seek to monetize individuals' attention and digital social media platforms engineer society,<sup>8</sup> my students increasingly describe an existence in which reading a full-length book is a difficult exercise, not to mention having a face-to-face conversation. Maryanne Wolf (2018) supports my students' anecdotes with larger-scale research in *Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World*, which confirms the sense that students' (and scholars') attention is increasingly divided by the way our lives are infused with smaller and smaller bits of textuality, disrupting our capacity to engage in sustained reading and reflection (72–73). And the consequences are not only textual; media studies professor Douglas Rushkoff (2019) describes university students with such difficulty coming face-to-face with a human other that he explicitly tells them to practice making *eye contact*.

In other words, we have plenty of reason for investigating what it means to do justice to a literary text and how such texts might invite us into practices of attention that can help us resist the blend of hyperattention and attention deficit that grows out of the current digital economy. While J. Hillis Miller (2015) himself has recently (and rather cynically) denied much reason for teaching literature now apart from pleasure and perhaps the capacity to spot fake news, I would argue that an ethics of literary attention explores the relationship between reader and text in part to suss out the possibilities of reading as an exercise that develops our capacity to attend in general.

Such an approach returns us not just to Emmanuel Levinas but also to Simone Weil, who famously argues in *Waiting for God* (Weil 1973) that "school studies", even geometry homework, can train students' capacity to attend to both God in prayer and a suffering other. For Weil, attention is the ethical practice *par excellence*; it "consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object" (111). This passive (and also inescapably gendered) openness to the other for the sake of the other's being in the world sounds very much like Attridge's Levinas-inspired description of readerly ethics. Yet while Levinas' face-to-face encounter is rooted in phenomenology, a descriptive claim about how reality *works*, how the intersubjective encounter precedes being, Weil's theory of attention is more explicitly normative. She argues that the practice of this kind of "empty, waiting" attention (112) in school exercises can form in students the capacity to help "someone in

<sup>7</sup> Also see Irigaray (1993) and Chanter (2001).

<sup>8</sup> For an excellent scholarly overview of the attention economy, see Citton (2017). Other recent book length projects on attention include Watson (2017) and Odell (2019).

affliction" (115), to "give one's attention to a sufferer", which "is a very rare and difficult thing" (114). For Weil, such attention, codified here in the Judeo-Christian vocabulary of "love for our neighbour", "simply means being able to say to him: 'What are you going through?'" (115). Weil acknowledges that attending to a suffering other is both simple and nearly impossible, but she nevertheless centers her entire ethical paradigm on this face-to-face engagement.

Weil's writing is no less implicitly gendered than Levinas' and certainly no less inflected with religion, though in Weil's case, Christian rather than Jewish,<sup>9</sup> and the embeddedness of her ethical theorizing within explicitly Christian allusions makes it perhaps harder for scholars to elide the religious root, though a surprisingly large number try. Both philosophers are notoriously hyperbolic, their style difficult, their metaphors stretching toward the literal. They share a sense of the radical importance of attentive interpersonal encounter and the biblical mandate of responsibility for an other inherent in the other's vulnerability, even to the point of self-sacrifice.<sup>10</sup> Weil, though, brings the explicit vocabulary of *attention* that resonates so powerfully in the contemporary moment, leading to her work's rising popularity in literary theory, as in Yoon Sook Cha (2017) *Decreation and the Ethical Bind: Simone Weil and the Claim of the Other*.

Still, Weil's ethics of responsibility for the other carries with it just as much risk as Levinas' of inviting vulnerable subjects to sacrifice too much. For this reason, I maintain that in our literary ethics a structural, apparently universal, relationship between text and reader, abstracted to the level of theory, is *not enough.* On its own, it misses too much—not just the importance of gender, religion, race, and other forms of particularity, but also the question of *from whose experience we are theorizing*. Much of the literary critical conversation on ethics has focused on Dickens, Henry James, or J.M. Coetzee, with a significant exception for philosophers' love of Jane Austen and a veritable cottage industry on Toni Morrison. Some of the more influential recent books on literary ethics continue to show surprisingly limited attention to writers outside the traditional canon, with the result that the literature itself may not highlight the risks of elevating a self-giving, passive, endlessly responsible Reader (implicitly but never admittedly modeled after a self-sacrificing mother or messiah).

However, like so many contemporary texts written by women of color, *The Break* suggests both an ethics of readerly attention—an ethics of reading founded in the novel's own metafictional self-commentary, one that invites a conversation with Levinas and Weil—and an ethics of representation—a challenging of the abstracted Reader with a devastating reminder of the particularity and complexity of not the Reader but readers, not the Moral Subject but moral subjects—and that Western philosophy may not be the only or best source for thinking about ethics.

#### **2. Attending**

At the level of representation, *The Break* certainly highlights the complexity of things, not only through its multiply-focalized narrative structure but also through its representation of these multiple characters' psyches. Even in the face of the assault and the subsequent hospital stay and investigation, Emily's family members and friends negotiate their concern for her with their own memories of the past and worries in the present. The novel demonstrates how each character is complexly motivated and sees from a different angle, embedded in her own life. This complexity is in addition, of course, to the novel's striking verisimilitude on the urgent ethico-political topic of physical and sexual violence

<sup>9</sup> Levinas (1952) was famously critical of Weil for her deeply problematic relation to the Jewish tradition, as in his essay "Simone Weil Against the Bible". For a helpful reading of the relationship between the two philosophers' ideas, see Gillian Rose (1993) essay "Angry Angels: Simone Weil and Emmanuel Levinas".

<sup>10</sup> While not many creative writers were reading Emmanuel Levinas' philosophy in the mid-to-late twentieth century, many of them *were* reading Simone Weil, whose work was first translated into English in the 1950s. Turning to Levinas—who was familiar with Weil's work and famously disapproving of her—to parse out literary dynamics that likely derive from Weil's influence does not feel quite right. These scholarly dynamics warrant further thought.

against Indigenous women and girls, violence so dire that the final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (2019) <sup>11</sup> termed the phenomenon "genocide".

Yet read in terms of the New Ethical Criticism, *The Break* also seems to suggest a metafictional ethics, an ethics of *paying attention* that is also an ethics of reading. Such an ethics is not a thing apart from the novel's representational content but a concurrent lesson in how to attend to the painful reality. The novel suggests such an ethics, in part, through its insistent thematizing of looking, particularly looking at others' faces, and the thematics of responsibility. In the interpersonal encounters of the characters, this thematics of looking and face-to-face encounters accrues a broader significance through repetition: the refusal of responsibility that could arise from face-to-face relating is overwhelmingly coded negative in the text, whereas attentive face-to-face encounters, which register the vulnerability of the other and provoke responsibility and active caretaking, are overwhelmingly positive. This explicit thematics parallels Levinas and Weil in notable ways, ways that make the novel particularly resonant as an intervention in a literary ethical discourse already in conversation with the philosophers.

The importance of sincere attention to others, and particularly the shared gaze of the face-to-face encounter, is perhaps most powerfully demonstrated in scenes of its absence. The narrative dramatizes two such scenes, both in characters' memories, with devastating results. In one such memory, Stella recalls a high school party at which her friend Elsie was sexually assaulted, and the scene is rendered in repeated terms of failed attention: Stella "didn't notice all the other guys following" Elsie and a boy upstairs; "none of the girls noticed" how long they were upstairs (202). When Stella and her cousin Lou finally bring Elsie downstairs, "no one looked up and everyone was partying again like nothing happened" (204). But something *did* happen, although following the familiar mechanisms of trauma the details remain in "big, blank spaces where all the answers should be" (205).<sup>12</sup> What Stella and Lou discover when they go upstairs to find their friend is chilling: "Elsie was the first thing they saw once they turned the corner. Elsie's beautiful curly hair pressed to her face by a large hand. The scene became clearer with every step" (202). As Lou screams at the young men and tries to cover her friend's body with a blanket, "Stella only watched Elsie's face, still pressed into the pillow, her mouth open, her hair damp" (203).

If in Levinas [1957] (1993) terms, in the face of an other "one is confronted with the mandate, 'You shall not kill,'" in contrast with the desire to possess, own, or use an other (109), it is not accidental that the rapist presses Elsie's head down, avoiding the ethical challenge implicit in her face, which would "put [his] freedom into question" (115). Of course, one can reject the implicit ethical command in another's face, but this scene dramatizes with horrifying concreteness the refusal of a face-to-face encounter that could be the foundation of an ethical relating. It is also painfully echoed in the eventual scene of the attack on Emily, which comes late in the novel, and which uses the repetitive vocabulary of her rapist's "hand over her face" (308, 309).

It is also not accidental that in the grammar of the sentence describing what Stella and Lou witness when they turn the corner, Elsie is described as the "first thing" they see. This phrasing is both common grammatical usage and also an implication of the way, as Weil (1965) argues, force turns a human into a thing (6; also see Levinas [1957] 1993, p. 97).13 The novel further highlights this devastating result as it repeatedly depicts Elsie after she has been assaulted as emptied of agency and the capacity for human connection. She is "just limp, like she was passed out but her eyes were open" (203); she "just looked off at nothing. Her eyes looked dead" (204). Years later, when she sees Elsie on the street, Stella notes that her "face looked older than it should have", but Stella intentionally walks by "real close, so their

<sup>11</sup> (National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls 2019).

<sup>12</sup> Consider Sommer (1994): "In some resistant texts, silence is the willed muteness of trauma, a defensive armor against humiliating or panic-provoking memories" (538). Against a sense of *willed* muteness, however, is Simone Weil (Weil 1973) insistence that those who are traumatized by *malheur*, or affliction, "have no words to express what is happening to them" (120), an idea taken up in much twentieth-century trauma theory.

<sup>13</sup> The "thingification" implicit in oppression also calls to mind Martin Buber's *I-Thou* paradigm.

eyes could meet. Elsie saw her but there was no recognition, her eyes were as blank as they had been that night. Still dead" (207). Again, this blankness depicts a recognizable trauma response, but in the vocabulary of the novel, and of Levinas and Weil, it is significant that what Stella seeks is a face-to-face human encounter, and that Elsie's capacity for such an encounter seems to have been cut off. And while readers do not realize it at this midway point of the novel, by its end they will also recognize the heartbreaking after-effects of Elsie's trauma on the next generation, as the pieces come together to reveal that Elsie's daughter, conceived in that assault, is the perpetrator of the assault on Emily.

Similarly embedding the characters in a narrative of the after-effects of sexual violence against Indigenous women, Cheryl remembers the doctors' failure of responsibility toward her sister Rain, who was sent away from the hospital when she presented herself after being beaten up, also in terms of the doctors' failure of *looking*: "They didn't even treat her. Just put her right back out in the street. Didn't even look, just thought she was another drunk and didn't care" (180). This failure of looking, of *attending* to a suffering other, precipitates Rain's death that night, as she wanders with a head injury in the freezing temperatures. Such failure is emphasized even more strongly by the implicit contrast with what immediately follows, as Cheryl's daughter Lou hears this story again and almost in response attends to her niece in the hospital bed: "I go over to Emily and look at her for a long time. She smiles up at me, an apologetic smile that makes me want to cry all over again" (181). Lou's face-to-face encounter with Emily, her *attention* to Emily, manifests as a stark contrast to Rain's much earlier treatment in the familiar setting of the hospital.

Indeed, Lou is one of the characters who consistently practices sustained acts of looking at others, a practice that the novel signals as good, even restorative. Again and again, Lou (the only character whose section is narrated in first-person) describes others' faces: "Ziggy's little face all white bandages" (175), Sunny's "young face [that] seemed to have aged" (175), Jake's "face pale in its pain" (175), her "mother's face struck red, wet and folded into itself" (175). Lou looks at others as a way of reading them, assessing their wellbeing (not coincidentally, she is a child welfare social worker) in order to be able to better care for them. In the hospital, Lou not only looks at Emily "for a long time" but also at Cheryl: "I look at her long, my poor mom and all she's been through" (180). The phrasing here echoes Weil's paradigmatic ethical question, the miracle of looking at a suffering other and asking what they are going through. Lou *attends* to others in a way that opens up space for caring.

We see this caring, and the healing it can bring about, in the experience of Emily's best friend Zegwan, or Ziggy, as well. Sick with guilt that she did not keep her friend from being hurt, Ziggy finds herself squarely in her father's gaze: "He keeps looking at her" (212). When she finally admits how ashamed and guilty she feels how she "couldn't do anything", "didn't do anything", her father, again, "looks at her, right in the eye like he does" and asks, "What could you have done?" (213). The passage is repetitive, again stating, "He keeps looking at her" (213), but the repetition emphasizes the sustained interpersonal connection and the importance of the character's attention. When he empathizes with her feeling of shame but insists she has nothing to be ashamed of, that there "was nothing [she] could've done" (214), the words seem to genuinely free Ziggy from her shame and empower her to seek out Emily, whom she asks to visit in the hospital, and thereby expand the practice of paying attention to a suffering other rather than hiding in isolation. When the friends reunite in the hospital, "Ziggy looks up and looks at Emily closely" (307), and in a powerful display of mutuality "Emily looks at her friend", whose face was also beaten up on the night of the attack, and asks, "Does it hurt?" (306). This question is another variation on Weil's, an other-oriented expression of attention and care that highlights the degree to which Emily is not just a victim but a surviving subject.14

Of course, characters who do not share Lou or Ziggy's father's capacity to look at others, particularly suffering others, and pay attention to what they are going through are not all morally

<sup>14</sup> Flora, mostly known as Kookom in the novel (Cree for grandmother), and her daughter Cheryl also exemplify this capacity to look at others. When Stella goes to visit, her "Aunty Cher" "looks Stella up and down, examining her the way Kookoo does" (194); likewise, "Kookom's cloudy grey eyes look up at Stella, all seeing" (195).

suspect. Like Elsie, many of the characters struggle to make eye contact, or turn their faces away from others, from a place of pain. When Emily "turns away from all of them" earlier in the narrative and "begins to cry even though she tries to hide her broken face" (183), the novel certainly does not suggest this is an ethical failure but an understandable outgrowth of her trauma. In her sorrow over her daughter's experience, Paul likewise struggles at points to make eye contact (185), though she does "stud[y] her girl", whose "face seems so tiny, the wounds there bigger somehow", which leads to Paul's sense of feeling useless and exposed rather than a capacity for caring responsibility (182). In other words, in the novel's insistent thematizing of faces, looking, and caring responsibility, difficulty looking is not always a moral flaw: sometimes it results directly from suffering, a point made even more inescapably in the gradual revelation that Phoenix—homeless, abuse survivor, daughter of Elsie, described repeatedly as one other characters do not attend to—is herself the one who sexually assaulted Emily.

To be clear, these scenes are not metaphors for reading: to render them as such would be a great injustice against their representation of a reality that is all too real. Instead, they are a robust and consistent interpersonal ethical paradigm within the novel. Yet *The Break* does invite metafictional theorizing about the attention we pay to a text in the character of Tommy, the young police detective who takes on Emily's case with his reluctant partner Christie. Tommy is keen and earnest. While the novel opens with a scene of Tommy, Christie, and Stella silent around her kitchen table, "all looking down or away" (7), subsequent pages and chapters highlight Tommy's desire to take Stella seriously, even though his older partner shrugs her off as a "crazy dame" (68). After they leave Stella's house, even though Christie has said there is nothing to the case, Tommy calls multiple hospitals in search of a clue (78). Tommy cares about the crime Stella has witnessed, and eventually the assault Emily has experienced, in part because Indigenous women remind him of his mother (75). He is deeply invested in the case, even going to his mother for advice as it unfolds.

Tommy's compassion for Emily and her family, his resistance to Christie's apathy, and the fact that he is one of the novel's focalizing characters, invite readers' identification: he is a likeable guy, in part because of his persistence as a Métis police officer taking his partner's racist microaggressions. And the opening for readers to identify with Tommy is not just a result of his characterization: it is also a structural element of the mystery genre, which, as Alan Goldman (2011) argues, generally functions by setting up readers to identify with the detective as their double in parsing out the narrative's clues (268). Goldman asserts that this functions both cognitively, as readers both work with and compete with the character-detective in figuring out the details of a crime (265), and also emotionally, as readers empathize with the detective's feelings and experience and also seek to understand the perpetrator's motivations (267).

*The Break* takes this genre-driven invitation to associate detective with reader one step further by insistently associating Tommy with textuality. From the narrative's first scene, Tommy is associated with writing, "The younger one goes over his scribbled notes, the paper of his little coiled book flips and crumples" (7). Interviewing Emily in the hospital, he "checks his little book" (185). Later we read that he "has painstakingly written and rewritten all his notes" (220). In a way, Tommy's textual practices almost seem to suggest he is not just a double for readers, seeking to piece the narrative together, but for literary critics, perhaps most damningly when we read that he "takes notes, makes reports" (76) that too frequently "become just words on a screen" (77).

Yet the narrative also echoes an uncomfortably apt readerly experience in Tommy's work to solve the mystery as it presents his more-than-altruistic interest in the case. Stella notes from their first encounter that while Officer Christie appears "bored", "the younger one, he's so young, is eager, maybe even excited" (8). Tommy intuits the crime Stella reported may have been a rape, though Christie insists it is not, and back in the car he keeps "listening for a sex assault" on the radio, "wondering if one will be reported. He's kind of hoping for it, just to prove the old guy wrong" (72). The idea of *hoping* to hear a sexual assault reported for any reason is troubling. The discomfort is increased in the scene when Tommy first questions Emily in the hospital, as she speaks, "he feels excited for some reason" (124). He has to force himself to "speak slowly", and soon "He can't hold in his odd excitement. It all seems so real and he's going to fix it" (124). As details come out, "He has to swallow to keep from sounding too excited"; he "wants to shout but stays calm and collected" (126); after Emily provides another detail, he "smiles. Elated" (127). In the hall outside the room, he *keeps smiling*.

In an almost obscenely explicit way, Tommy's pleasure in discovery dramatizes the risk of gaining aesthetic pleasure from a text about another's suffering. Tommy's excitement, his delight in uncovering these clues, is in a certain sense understandable. It is also structurally fundamental in the mystery genre: readers' pleasure is rooted in reconstructing a scene of violence that they can retroactively witness. But even as its genre invites it, Vermette's novel will not let us forget how problematic such pleasure can be. In the terms of the New Ethical Criticism, Tommy reminds us of the dangers of seeking to master a narrative in a way that primarily enlarges the self.

Perhaps ironically, it is Officer Christie who takes the wind out of Tommy's sails. In the hall, Christie congratulates the smiling Tommy: "You're now the proud owner of one hell of a ... rape case" (127). We read, "Tommy's face melts down, slowly" (127). As the case continues, so does Tommy's attentive persistence, but tempered now by the realization of what a serious and painful situation it is. Instead of pleasure in uncovering details, Tommy feels embodied empathy for Emily: "it hurt[s] to look at her" bandaged face (291). As he begins to realize who the perpetrator is, he resists the knowledge, again, perhaps aligned with readerly experience: "It has to be [guys]", he says and thinks. "It has to be" (295). It takes his mother's advice and stories to convince Tommy that it is possible for a young woman to violently sexually assault another, but even so he feels unsettled: "He wants everything to be different. He wants the simplicity of finality, but it's never like it is in the movies. It always lingers on" (302).

Tommy's experience begs to be read as metatextual commentary on the novel's own open-endedness. My students resonate powerfully with his discomfort at the idea Phoenix is guilty of the crime. What begins as pleasure in the clues falling into place is disrupted by the very shape of the narrative, and Tommy's experience dramatizes that development. Even at the moment of the resolution, the narrative unsettles us, and in so doing it offers a serious lesson in the dangers of, in Sommer (1994) words, reading any story to "feel aggrandized, enriched by the appropriation and confident that our cunning is equal to the textual tease" (528).

#### **3. Witnessing**

If Tommy doubles as the reader of the mystery in his role as detective, Stella doubles as reader in her role as witness to the crime. In Levinasian terms, once faced with the event she sees from an upper window in her house, Stella is rendered in some sense inescapably responsible. The narrative opens after the event of witnessing, after Stella has called the police and waited hours for them to arrive, and so readers are introduced to the story's events not by sharing her full view of the assault but through her reconstruction of it, her testimony to the police officers. Though they express repeated doubt that the assault was sexual, Stella is sure she saw a rape from the second-storey window when she went to calm her crying baby in the night. She is sure she saw a "really tiny woman" (9).

As the novel unfolds, it is clear that Stella feels the weight of her responsibility to the woman she saw being attacked. This responsibility coalesces around the fact that she did not go out to the woman but stayed inside, ostensibly out of the competing responsibility for her three children: she tells the police, "It looked bad, so I called 911. But I couldn't do anything, my baby was crying so hard. He's teething" (10). Starting at the beginning again, the officers ask whether she went outside or talked to the person, and after Stella shakes her head she feels "shame" (11). Later, after the officers have pieced together the crime Stella witnessed with a hospitalized girl, Stella feels she is "horrible" (162). She seems to be judging herself for not going out to help the girl, a sense confirmed by the scene that arrives in the novel's center, a retelling of the night's events, in which we read that Stella did not stay with her crying baby after all but, after calling 911, "ran downstairs but then stood, frozen in the kitchen" (172). Stella overcomes her frozenness to put on her husband's boots but then hears another

of her children cry; she opens the door but the alarm goes off and she cannot remember the code; her eldest child calls for her, but Stella issues a reassurance and continues to open the door, then "stopped again": "The woman was sitting up, alone ... But Stella just watched her" (172). Again, Stella tries to go out, and again stops: "She shook her head. Knowing she should do something, not knowing what to do. What could she do?" (173). Her children keep calling, and Stella keeps standing there, until finally she tells herself the police will help, and then runs back upstairs "to her screaming kids" (173).

In class discussion, I ask my students whether the novel suggests a judgment of Stella: faced with a vulnerable, suffering other, she wavers between helping and turning away. Faced with the radical needs of an other she does not know, an other out in public, she retreats to her private domestic sphere, choosing to attend to her children, crying but unwounded, rather than the other whose wounds demand her attention. Confronted with risk to her own person, as the assailants have fled the scene but could return, Stella retreats up the stairs to watch through her window.

Stella herself continues to be wracked with guilt over her inaction: she cannot seem to shake her sense of unfulfilled responsibility, not only in this scene but to the grandmother she has not visited for months and eventually returns to. "I feel so awful, Kookoo", she tells her grandmother, "You don't even know"; "I'm not a good person at all" (333). Despite her Kookom's reassurances, other characters voice harsh judgment. When Emily's grandma Cheryl tells her friend Rita that the witness had not gone out to help the girl, Rita cannot hide her "disgust": "So she, like, saw it happening and did nothing? I can't fucking believe that" (342). Cheryl reminds Rita that Stella called the police, but Rita asks again, "she couldn't do anything? Nothing?" before repeating twice in conversation, "she should have" (343).

I ask my students: do you agree with Rita's judgment? The room is divided.

Next, I ask, are we Stella? Students who chuckle uncomfortably when I ask if we are Tommy are silent now. There is a way in which the question is obvious: like Tommy, Stella is distinctively associated in the novel with stories and textuality, associations that issue a metafictional invitation. As her Kookom tells her late in the narrative, "You have always been a storyteller, a story keeper, a watcher" (335). This assessment rings true with what has preceded it in the narrative, for it is in Stella's chapters, Stella's memory, that the novel frames stories of a shared girlhood experience of sexual harassment (165–170) and of Elsie's rape (202–205). It is in Stella's memory that we read the fullest account of Rain—her mother—turned away from the hospital and sent out to die in the cold, and how Stella "learned all the facts" through newspaper articles, police reports, and repeated questions to her family, in order to piece together these details into a "story" (272).

The novel thus invites an association of Stella and reader-as-witness, rendered responsible when faced with the text. As Attridge (2015) writes, "we can draw on Levinas' insistence that responsibility is not something we choose to take on, but something we find ourselves already seized by ... . Thus I would argue that we are *constituted* as literary readers by the responsibility for the work that imposes itself upon us" (126). This responsibility is "*for* the other—ultimately, for the other's survival" (126). In Attridge's description, which he admits is not an "extrapolation" Levinas would have accepted (126), the reader is responsible for the wellbeing and survival of the text; in Stella's case, the other for whose wellbeing and survival she is rendered responsible in her act of witnessing is most immediately a sexually assaulted young woman, a fact the novel will not let us forget even as it also invites a metafictional reading.

Stella, like Tommy, is a double for readers and perhaps even especially professional readers. Highlighting her role as a watcher, a keeper of stories, a *witness*, I ask my students again, is Stella *us*? Does the novel invite judgment of anyone confronted by an other in need who does nothing to help, who turns away from the responsibility implicit in the act of witnessing, in the very act of reading?

These questions imply a normative edge, a doubled ethics of the text that is both interpersonal and aesthetic. But it is almost impossible to render these questions into the fully abstracted sphere of reader and text. Attridge continues to insist that an ethical approach to literature is about "treating a work as an event", rather than solely considering "anything to be learned or deduced from it" (124), but he also admits that "a responsible reading of the words on the page can't avoid attending to the strands that tie them to the world they arose from" (126). In *The Break*, the strands that tie these representations to the world invoke the urgency and painfulness of the all too real phenomenon of sexual violence, and violence against Indigenous women and girls in particular, a phenomenon embedded in gendered, raced, and colonial histories and systems of injustice.

Indeed, *particularity* disrupts our tendency to generalize: not categorical "otherness" or "alterity", but the specific details and identity of both survivor and witness. The novel stages this negotiation of the general and the particular in Stella's horrifying realization that the anonymous "tiny woman" she saw from a distance is actually her own cousin. Stella's haunted sense of unfulfilled responsibility is profound even before she gains this knowledge, although she does try to calm herself by agreeing with her white husband that "it's not like anything happened to us or anything": "She tries to remind herself of this too. Nothing actually happened to her. She wasn't hurt, her family wasn't hurt, not at all" (160). The distance implied here, that one can care less about a stranger than a family member, does not align with responsibility as Levinas or Weil would construe it, and it also does not sit well with Stella's own conscience. Nor does the text allow it, as only pages later she discovers from her Kookom the terrible irony that the assault victim in fact *is* family (171).

This revelation leads to the re-narrated scene at the center of the novel that tells more fully what happened that night, the one in which Stella attempts over and over again to go out to help the small woman but again and again stops. The new information about the young woman's identity reframes the scene, by making more explicit Stella's attempts to fulfill her perceived responsibility and also revising in her consciousness who the woman was, staging the transition from general to particular. "She pulled the door open and stopped again. The woman was sitting up, alone. Emily was sitting up alone in the snow, pulling on her pants. But Stella just watched her, watched Emily through the glass, fogged by the cold" (172). As the scene dramatizes Stella's revised memory of the night, Stella's horror at what she saw, and what she could not quite manage to do, intensifies: "She saw the woman, girl, Emily, saw her get up, so slow, and limp a step" (173). This real time memory revision—not just a woman but a *girl* (Emily is only 13 years old), not just a girl but *Emily*—renders the scene even more painful, not just because Emily is family but because Emily is *particular*.

This negotiation of general and particular manifests as well in the novel's insistent thematizing of faces and face-to-face encounters. In Tommy's consciousness, "all those women blend into one, their faces so similar. The young girl, poor Emily, tiny and broken in the hospital bed, her aunt with the haunting eyes, looking so carefully, and the witness lady, so relieved they didn't think she was crazy anymore. They all look the same—same long dark hair, straight and shiny, same almond eyes, almost" (221). Tommy's blending of the women into one derives in part from their family resemblance, a fact the novel repeats (for instance, 160, 194). Yet it also highlights the risk of stereotyping, lumping all these Indigenous women into a categorical victim, a risk visible as well in Tommy's association of these women with his own mother and her experience of domestic violence.

The importance of particularity in the face-to-face encounter is rendered even more explicitly in Stella's fully narrated act of witnessing, for as she insists in her second account to the police that she "couldn't see any faces" (162), the revelation of Emily's identity *also* revises her memory of whether she saw the rape survivor's face. In the re-remembered scene of witnessing, it is not just that the woman's face becomes Emily's face, as her identity moves from categorical gender to Emily's name. Instead, we read that Stella in fact *did* see the girl's face in the original scene: "For a second, her face was aglow in the light, and the snow dancing around her, and Stella wanted to scream" (173).

This ultimate confrontation with the assault survivor's face seems to be the last straw that freezes Stella in inaction and leads her to turn away. Coupled with the scene's earlier description of how Stella after seeing the woman in the snow at first "paused there, remembering something she hadn't thought of in a long time" (172), this tension between the general/anonymous and the particular face is a clue, a beckoning. In the classroom, we pause over this scene. We attend to its most minute details in the closest of readings, open to it, tentative, careful. When the pieces click into place and we feel that thrum of satisfaction, we think guiltily of Tommy's pleasure. We talk about the impossibility of moral purity, the risk of engagement.

This is what we discern: the very details of Emily's rape, the winter snow, the "bottom naked", recall the details of Stella's mother's death, details we only learn later in the narrative (272). This "story" that Stella has pieced together and kept as a "story keeper" may be the "something" she remembers but has not thought of in a long time. That recollection would explain the subsequent internal battle Stella fights as she tries to go out to help the young woman. Likewise, the face Stella sees later takes on a different significance in light of the fact that Stella looks just like her own mother Rain (160) and that she also looks like all the other women descended from her Kookom (194, 220). In other words, the face Stella sees in the distance may make Stella want to scream and then freeze her in inaction not because it looks like Emily but because it looks like her own self, like all her relatives, like her lost mother. This indeterminacy points to both the overwhelming accrual of pain for these women in general and also the pointed particularity of a singular life.

A painstakingly careful reading of the scene, one that requires a rereading of the passage in light of later scenes and revelations, opens up the degree to which Stella is not a free subject, with full capacity to respond by taking responsibility, but a specifically *traumatized* witness. Stella's own particularity disallows an easy moral judgment of her inaction. The recognition of what her husband patronizingly calls her "past" (15), of her prior experiences of sexual harassment, her witnessing of Elsie's rape, her piecing together of her mother's story, not to mention the childhood *loss* of her mother, disrupts our capacity to generalize her experience as a witness without reference to the specific. Stella's experience, her centrality in the text, her haunted sense of limitless responsibility, invites questions about the ethics of witnessing. It even invites us to *practice* the kind of readerly attention that models careful, slow, open, and risky care for a textual other. But it unsettles us with the reminder that at its root, the face is not a category but a singular, individuale. fac The reader is not a free, untraumatized moral actor but bears any number of burdens when facing a given work of literature.

#### **4. Relearning**

A rigorous assessment of literary ethics in all its modes is more important now than ever as the structures of daily life in Western culture undermine our capacity to pay attention, as language and story are used to justify rendering others *things* rather than responding to the vulnerability implicit in their faces. How easily we stereotype, flattening a nuanced human being, attributing guilt, justifying our refusal of responsibility. With great difficulty do we look at an other and ask, with full openness, "What are you going through?"

Literary writing does something singular; it is a Saying that disrupts the Said (Levinas again), a "questing toward what otherwise may be" (Adrienne Rich's phrase), an event that asks us to partner in its own creation (this is Attridge and also Weil). It both prompts and challenges naïve conceptions of mimesis, but I am convinced that it is too late in the game for any of us to deny the importance of its ethical *content* in favour of its form alone. *The Break* represents something indisputably related to reality; faced with this novel, I am rendered responsible not just to partner in its creation as an aesthetic event by giving it my full and hospitable attention but to *do something in the world it represents*. The only way to claim that literary texts as a rule do not represent reality and invite responsibility is this is to theorize without being in conversation with any of the many, many texts that *do.* This is an essential challenge for literary scholars moving forward.

But not everyone who reads this novel is a literary scholar, nor can everyone who reads it respond in the same way. If Tommy teaches us a lesson about the risks of readerly mastery and aesthetic pleasure in a story of suffering, Stella reminds us that different readers read from different positions and that to generalize limitless responsibility may further marginalize the already marginalized. This diversity manifests powerfully in the space of the classroom as a reading community, where male students often express surprise at the ubiquity of sexual harassment in the novel while women nod with weary familiarity. Likewise, settler students often express dismay at the structural inequalities that lead to so much of the novel's suffering, connecting the text's dynamics with statistics and histories they are learning in Indigenous studies, history, and sociology classes, often with shock at how little they knew of these realities before coming to university. Indigenous students, though, particularly in the first-year course, have been more likely to talk to me after class or in a writing assignment about the novel's familiarity, which paradoxically has both provoked pain and also a deep sense of relief at *for once* recognizing sisters and aunties, fathers and brothers in a literary text assigned on a university syllabus. And then there are the students who choose to excuse themselves from the reading and the discussion, aware enough of their own particular pain to own that facing this literary text would not bring good into their lives or the world. The anecdotes are instructive: the plurality of readers is a reality we would do well to bring more fully into our theorizing of literary ethics. And this plurality parallels the plurality of ethical systems at work in the world, another point our literary ethics may not yet have fully enough addressed.

As *The Break* begins with the land, it ends with the land, and specifically with ceremony on land south of the city, where "the bush closes in ... like a quick greeting hug" (340). Kookom has died, passing on the matriarchal role to Cheryl, and she gathers with her family on this land outside the city to smudge with sage and sit and sing together in the steam of the sweat lodge (344–45). Emily is there with Zegwan, and Cheryl notes both the girls' "resilience" and also the way Ziggy's face is still wounded, the way Emily "still walks with a limp, and even here, with only her family around her, she sits with her body curled into itself like a turtle ready to retreat inward" (339). The resolution here is by no means happy, but it is strong and full of love. The novel's final pages narrate both the immensity of the group's ongoing pain—Cheryl notes, "They're already so broken, could they even break any more?" (344)—and also the renewal brought by the ceremony, by the gathering of community. The possibility of Emily's healing seems to inhere in these two related practices, ceremony and community, as does the healing of her family and friends, broken by witnessing her pain as well as their own individual burdens.

This ending is illuminating in its reminder that ethics is so often embedded in spiritual traditions: not just that Levinas' philosophy is best understood in conversation with his essays on Judiasm or Weil's in terms of her quasi-Christianity, but that the characters in *The Break* live and act within the practices of their own spiritual and philosophical traditions. The caring attention they devote to one another throughout the text, the concerted looking, the open listening, the concrete acts of help and practice of presence, may not be most fully explained by Western philosophical models of face-to-face encounter and attention. A more consonant source may be Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017), who in her work describes finding in other Indigenous stories "A way of living that was full of community. A way of living that was thoughtful and profoundly empathetic. A way of living that considered, in a deep profound way, relationality" (22). Simpson connects this way of being in the world to the land, to the land that has been dispossessed by settler colonialism and the land to which Indigenous people relate not through possession and conquest but "connection—generative, affirmative, complex, overlapping, and nonlinear *relationship*" (43). This description of relationship to the land also describes the relationships among Vermette's characters; in fact, it describes the very form of her novel. In other words, while I have been arguing that *The Break* has a great deal to teach scholars about the New Ethical Criticism, the New Ethical Criticism may not have quite so much to teach us about *The Break.*

As it turns out, Kookom is the one who can teach us about the Break, and *The Break*. Eventually we realize that it is her voice—Kookom's, Flora's—that narrates those sans-serif sections between chapters. Kookom's voice as the storytelling elder opens the novel, framing its setting and characters, victims, witnesses, and perpetrators alike, in a history of dispossession from the land, the reference to the Red River (3) an allusion to the Métis uprising, to the negotiations of settler colonialism, to the strength and also the losses. Kookom's voice as the storytelling elder notes that while others do not notice this strip of land through the city, she has "always loved" it, would walk through it noticing the way elderly folks would plant gardens in it, "all nice and clean", the way looking down at the

grass would let you forget you are in the city (5). You do not notice it if you are not paying attention, Kookom says. You do not notice the land if you are not looking.

I did not notice the land when I moved here seven years ago, to Canada, to Saskatchewan, to Treaty Six Territory and the homeland of the Métis, did not realize how indivisible it was from Indigenous ways of being in the world. I had never learned about how similarly indivisible the land was from assessments of structural injustice, from violence against Indigenous women and girls, from the questions of what justice and healing might actually look like going forward, questions of concrete responsibility. Nor did I notice the importance of the land in *The Break* when I first read it, my eyes skimming past those opening pages into the urban setting, plot, and drama. Only rereading and rereading did I begin to see. This seeing sent me to books like Simpson's and Glen Sean Coulthard (2014) *Red Skin, White Masks* and Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) *Braiding Sweetgrass,* books that insist on the material, insist on the land. It sent me to sessions on my campus where I listen with every part of me I can muster to Cree and Métis elders and poets and scholars, floored at everything I never knew. It taught me all over again that my generalizing paradigms, of literary ethics, of postcolonial theory, of feminism, break, once again, under the weight of particularity.

To admit this, as a scholar, as a teacher, means returning to the humbling space of nonmastery, of a responsibility to keep learning. It means, as I have been saying here, challenging received theories, but also admitting that I have work to do if I am going to do justice to this text and so many others in the space of the classroom: decolonizing my theory and my teaching by decentering my own expertise. But as I face my students in all their minute and extraordinary particularity, confronted by the multiplicity of their differences from me and from each other, and as I ask them to face this text with me, I recognize the work as worthy. I have already been rendered responsible: but I endeavor, to the extent of my own capacity, to offer the kind of attention asked of me. This work is endless. It is also good.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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© 2019 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

## *Article* **Sonic Rhetorics as Ethics in Action: Hidden Temporalities of Sound in Language(s)**

#### **Steven B. Katz**

Emeritus College, Clemson University, Pendleton, SC 29670, USA; skatz@clemson.edu

Received: 17 October 2019; Accepted: 14 January 2020; Published: 29 January 2020

**Abstract:** Sonic rhetorics has become a major area of study in the field of rhetoric, as well as composition and literature. Many of the underlying theories of sonic rhetorics are based on post-Heideggerian philosophy, new materialism, and/or posthumanism, among others. What is perhaps similar across these theories of sonic rhetoric is their "turn" from language and the human in general. This short essay explores sonic rhetorics by examining three temporal dimensions found in language. Specifically, the essay focuses on the more obvious sonic dimensions of time in prosody, and then at deeper levels temporal dimensions in a couple of brief but revealing examples from ancient languages (classical Greek, and Biblical Hebrew). Further, this essay suggests some ways in which time is related to ethics in practice and action. For example, just as time is involved in the continuous creation of our increasingly vast, expanding, infinite but bounded universe, Levinas might say that time is necessary to create the ethical space, or perhaps "hypostasis," one needs for the possibility to encounter "*l'autre*"—the Other. Beyond prosody, propriety, even *kairos*, are hidden temporal dimensions of language that may render sonic rhetorics forms of ethical practice.

**Keywords:** sonic rhetorics; non-linguistic turn; time; space; ethics; prosody; etymology; Plato; Heidegger; Levinas; Alterity; the Other; orthography; classical Greek; Biblical Hebrew; the reversible *vov*

#### **1. Introduction: A Background of Sound**

Sonic rhetorics is undergoing an increasingly loud and noticeable boom. A growing number of scholars in cognate rhetorical fields have turned their auditory attention to sound as meaningful if not fundamental in both teaching and researching rhetoric, writing, literature, and philosophy, e.g., (Ahern 2018; Detweiler 2019; Gunn et al. 2013; Hawk 2018a; Measel 2020; LaBelle 2018; Novak and Sakakeeny 2015; Osborn 2016; Overall 2017; Patterson 2020; Rickert 2005, 2013; Rickert and Salvo 2006; Stedman 2012; Sterne 2012; Stone 2015). Generally, sonic rhetorics concerns itself with the multiple dimensions of rhetoric as sound. Sonic rhetorics, like "rhetorics" generally, can include literary as well as nonliterary texts, events, objects, natural/ecological sounds, etc., either in combination with visual or virtual stimuli or in isolation, as aural-born phenomena and/or as acoustic elements in soundscapes or larger entangled environments (Patterson 2020; Rice 2012, 2020).

The study of sound in rhetoric as sense (or nonsense)—the possible "meaning" of sound *in language*—can be said to have begun with (Plato 1961a, 1961c) but also may be found in more pre-Socratic lyrical poetry (Walker 2000), and perhaps even earlier in pre-Homo sapient pre-history (Rickert 2016). Sound was the hallmark of sophistic rhetoric that Plato fought against, in which style is a form of knowledge (Enos 1993; Kerferd 1981); in late Ciceronian theory of oratorical rhythm as an aural, temporal intuition of "truth" (Cicero 1939, 1942; Leff 1989; Mendelson 1998; Katz 1996); Medieval and Renaissance debates about Attic vs. Baroque prose styles and methods of figuration and scansion (Croll 1989; Ong 1958; Ramus 1983); research into the sophistication and intricacies of prosodic and musical notation of the song-poems of the Troubadours (Whigham 1979); and the 18th century Elocutionary Movement with its renewed emphasis on human (and nonhuman) sound, delivery, and

gesture/motion (Sheridan 1968; Austin 1966; cf. Bulwer 1974; Darwin 2009; Hawhee 2016). And this is just the briefest history of the musical properties of language in the field of rhetoric!

Although the study of sound in modern rhetoric and composition can be said to have begun with the images and metaphors of writing as "felt sense," "dissonance," and "musical organization" (Perl 1980; Odell 1993, p. 232; Elbow 2006), respectively, the birth of late 20th- and early 21st-century approaches to sonic rhetorics has been attributed to Katz's (1996) book, *Epistemic Music of Rhetoric* (Gries 2019; Hawk 2018a). However, the contemporary study and teaching of sonic rhetorics goes far beyond old-fashioned approaches, such as Katz's, that analyze literary (and nonliterary) language and style as music, and affective and/or cognitive responses to sound sound (cf. Ceraso 2018; Measel 2020). These new approaches include post-Heideggerian and/or phenomenological studies of sound and/or posthumanistic tracings and analyses of technological production and disseminations of sound (e.g., Rickert 2013; Rickert and Salvo 2006; Hawk 2018a, 2018b).

Given the diversity of this "subdiscipline," it is only to be expected that different conceptions, definitions, and even terms of sonic rhetorics ("the music of rhetoric," "sonic rhetorics," "aural-born rhetorics") have emerged. Some of the subsequent treatments of rhetorics variously called (or not called) sonic rhetorics are predicated on senses connected to the human body, and some apparently on senses disconnected from the human body—refocused on or furbished by "natural" sounds (Ahern 2018) or technological sounds (Rickert 2013) or aesthetic sound (Osborn 2016). Some sonic rhetorics consider magical, spiritual psychic, or psychagogic exploration (De Romilly 2013; Rice 2020; Stephens and Katz 2019). Some (pre)sonic philosophies and rhetorics zero in on and wrestle with the movement of the body, including natural bodily "functions" and their symbolization (Burke 2007; Hawhee 2009; Katz 2015b; Rueckert 2007), as well as the sensuousness movement of the symbolic form of language in consciousness (Cassirer 1955; Katz 1996); physical motion and dance (Hawhee 2013); theatre sound (Kaye and Lebrecht 2015; Patterson 2020); and the rhetoric of every kind of music, including jazz and hip-hop (Clark 2015; Carson 2017).

What is perhaps similar across many of these theories of sonic rhetorics is their turn away from language (the non-linguistic turn), and the human in general (the non-human turn). This is not surprising either, given the scientific, philosophical, and cultural contexts of new materialism and posthumanism (e.g., Barad 2007; Barrett and Boyle 2016; Bryant et al. 2011; Harman 2018; Hawk 2018a; Holmes 2013; Ahern 2018; Ceraso 2018; Detweiler 2019; Overall 2017; Pilsch 2017; Stone 2015). I will not critique or criticize any of these theories and studies. Rather, I applaud their diversity and encourage their development in (re)focusing the field of rhetoric on "the natural world"—on the nonhuman as well as aesthetic (sonic), on objects and animals and events in worsening physical climates and the social environs of the Anthropocene (Comstock and Hock 2016; Morton 2009, 2012, 2013; Propen 2018; Zylinska 2014). I will only point out in passing a few caveats and concerns1. What I want to do in this

<sup>1</sup> The old Baconian questions and philosophical qualms concerning not only objectivity but whether we ever "get out of" language, bodies, minds, limited senses, human consciousness, have not gone away. The issue of how we perceive (hear), relate to, and know external reality would seem to be particularly important in questions concerning nonlinguistic being and the nonhuman world. This is not the same issue about the relation of posthumanism to humanism (see (Braidotti 2013; Wolfe 2013). Cf. an interesting and sophisticated debate between Boyd (1993) and Kuhn (1993) about the role of metaphor in the construction of scientific fields, and whether or not metaphors in science lead researchers out to causal structures of the physical world [see Appendix A]). The issue is ontological as well as epistemological. The as is about the undeniable fact that at different levels we (and other things too) are *constituted* in relatively stable bodies and minds (more on this below), from which we perceive and "know." As the Copenhagen School of quantum mechanics was good at pointing out, despite technological development, our limitations as human beings persist, and the 'human variable' may always have to factor into any probability equation (Heisenberg 1958; Bohr 2010; cf. Katz 1996). Despite Entanglement Theory in new materialism, and a corresponding "demoting" of the power of language (see Barad 2007, esp. chp. 7), most of our thinking and discussion about sonic rhetorics take place *in language* (the echo of the origin of the (re)sound is located in the ear, depending for its mediation in the limited human sense of hearing). We may need to (re)remember that almost everything we do as humans is in and through the agency of language as "symbolic action" (see (Burke 1952, 1966, 1969; cf. LaBelle 2018); see Katz (2015b); Katz and Rivers (2017) for a more nuanced discussion of Burke in relation to posthumanism).

The question of how humans know is a decidedly postmodern one, focused as it is back on the human and on language—a take with which most scholars in sonic rhetorics today would probably take umbrage. But to some degree,

little essay is propose that there still may be some hidden sonic dimensions of sound "left behind" in language, and that they have some attendant ethical components and implications that might be important to consider in sonic rhetorics. This 'linguistic (re)turn' necessitates revisiting language via rhetorical and stylistic analysis, as well as some etymological work based on classical Greek and esoteric hermeneutics based on Biblical Hebrew, and therefore are epistemologically registered and referenced in the terms of the limitations of the human senses, mind, science, and technologies—the vagaries of human response and the uncertainties of all human knowledge and experience. This short essay quickly explores three dimensions of language underrepresented in sonic rhetorics: (1) Prosody; (2) Etymology; (3) Orthography.

Because a foundational "key" to sound (and ethics) is time, I will advance some notions of time not usually talked about, and then (1) touch on some more obvious sonic elements of time in prosody or poetics; (2) quickly dip into the history of a single passage and word of classical Greek and its temporal translations, and finally (3) point to a hermeneutic approach to the letters of the alefbet themselves as well as a meaningful temporal dimension of grammar in Biblical Hebrew. My choice of passages, languages, and methodologies is not systematic in the ordinary sense; rather, it is driven in part by the efficacy of examples, by my own hermeneutic access (and limitations) to different languages, and some hidden but highly revealing and significant sonic dimensions of time in those languages as ethical actions in "literary (and nonliterary) practice.

Before proceeding with these three analyses, we must quickly (re)examine our notions of time.

#### **2. (Re)Introduction to Time in Rhetoric**/**Rhetoric as Time**

The concept of time or timing in rhetoric is an ancient one. We have already, albeit quickly, reviewed the attention to the study of time in the history of rhetoric in the study of oratory, elocution, prose style, and song. A concern for propriety in eloquence, the perfect unity of form and content

on what I call 'the spectrum of linguistic determinacy', language influence thought, from a little to a lot. Derrida (1982) asserted that all philosophy is metaphor, and even Heidegger focused in on the role of language (Heidegger 2010b), sound in language (Heidegger 1971a), and poetry itself (Heidegger 1971b, 2014) in the construction of his philosophy of Being (Heidegger 2010a). A couple of related issues are pertinent to the study of sound and ethics, the purview of this essay. First, one is somewhat pressed to find discussions of sound as or in relation to ideology, such as the uses of sonic rhetorics for propaganda purposes, past, present, or future (cf. Birdsall 2012; Goodman 2012; Haynes 2016; LaBelle 2018). Second, one is seemingly less hard-pressed to find discussion of sound in relation to an ethical consideration of phronesis, or "ends." Scholarship concerned with teaching seems to consider ethics more (although that is a generalization [see Morton, passim]). One suspects that the ideology of sound, like sound itself, are assumed to be "natural," and thus "neutral" if not "wholesome," and therefore are already and always good. How much of "the value" of sound as pedagogy and praxis is driven by "naturalism," "metaphysical empiricism," or "technological imperatives"? In the past I have argued that even "social-epistemic" rhetoric is not ideologically neutral or necessarily good (Katz 1992, 1993; cf. Moses and Katz 2006; Katz and Rhodes 2010); the same may be said about sonic rhetorics. A wonderful new proclivity in sound studies is to regard ideology and ethics as questions of "access" and "circulation"—"praxis"—in advocating and using sound to teach environmental awareness, social justice, and equality (e.g., Ceraso 2018; Danforth et al. 2018; Gries and Brooke 2018; Hawk 2018a). Elenchi. Should we inquire about phronesis (ends) as well as praxis (means)? Can we keep sonic issues from being about technological values only, the way Hawk (2018b), or Ahern and Mehlenbacher (2019) do? Should we question phronesis itself? And what about our belief that we can overcome any perceived "deficiencies" of human bodies by medical/pharmaceutical means, genetical manipulation, or prosthetic enhancements? I am not talking about "Ableism" here, but existential election: the point at which the 'healthy' posthuman morphs into transhuman, with its new attendant ontological, epistemological, and physical alterations and commitments, none of which are ideologically or ethically neutral.

Further, how much is the absence/presence of ideology/ethics in sonic rhetorics connected to if not the result of the dismissal of language ("the nonlinguistic turn") and a decentering of the human (the "nonhuman-turn"). I see some danger here, but also justifications and value: sonic rhetorics are rightly focused on ecology—not only on acoustic ecology, but on damaged ecology—on the polluted environment, on human-made global warming, and on violent climate change in the Anthropocene (see Comstock and Hock 2016; Morton 2009; Pilsch 2017; Propen 2018; Zylinska 2014). Even when the study of the human and language is precluded, these scholars/studies rightly see sound studies as a way of enhancing our awareness of the nonhuman physical world and our effects on it through increased attention to sound. But even though we may be "entangled" with all living and nonliving things, we are still constituted at several levels of physicality, with bodily awareness and consciousness. Even though we are also part of the random flux, we are beings who mostly use language to negotiate and reconstruct the material world (Burke, passim; cf. Katz and Rivers 2017). So when we develop theories, are we merely extending metaphors (whether "active" or "passive" epistemic access (Boyd 1993; see Appendix A))? As I have asked before, can we continue to develop indeterminate methods to work with sound as well as affect (Katz 1996; cf. Katz 2015a)? Can we transcend current human consciousness (Katz 2015b, 2017; Katz and Rhodes 2010; Katz and Rivers 2017)?

at every moment of persuasion (Cicero 1939, 1942), and *kairos*, the relationship between rhetoric and ever-changing historical context and thus discourse as a time-event rather than a static object (Miller 1991), are important considerations of time in rhetoric. Of course, one of the "keys" to the study of sound (in language or music, in linguistic or nonlinguistic objects and events) is time. Just as time in astrophysics seems to be involved in the continuous creation of the increasingly vast, infinite, and unknowable physical space, so too with phenomenological-ethical time-space. For example, for Heidegger time allows the possibility to one's death as the "Event Horizon" and source of *Dasein*, of true Being-in-the-World (Heidegger 2010a). For Levinas, another ethical possibility of the time-space relation/expansion is to encounter, through increasing Alterity, or "hypostasis," *l'autre*—"the other" (or "Other," perhaps G/d)," which for Levinas may be the ultimate ground and goal of ethics (e.g., Levinas 1981, 1987, 2000).

But the issue of time in rhetoric (beyond historical chronology or audience measurement, beyond propriety, beyond *kairos*, even beyond prosody in prose), is immediately engaged anew in other possibilities of hidden sonic dimensions of language and literary practice and its relation to ethics. In the time-space constraints of this essay, I will investigate at least three dimensions of rhetorical–linguistic time that are perhaps concealed in the languages in which we live. Somewhat like Heidegger, but with so much less knowledge and moving in the opposite direction—into language rather than through and away from it in the ultimate search for *Alethia* (truth) through *Dasein* (Heidegger 2010a; cf. Heidegger 1971a, 1971b, 1977, 2010b, 2014)—I will attempt to "unconceal" three aural–temporal dimensions of language that might underlie studies of sonic rhetorics as ethical action in literary practice. These three dimensions are: (1) prosody; (2) etymology; and (3) orthography. We will see that time and ethics are involved in each one of these dimensions.

How should we think about time? The following are some assumptions and assertions.


animate and inanimate objects alike. (Hence the urgency we find in *Being and Time* for the fully cognizant human to recognize his/her own death, embrace it, and to give it and life full meaning.)


It is here that we will turn to our first example of the hidden temporal dimensions of sonic rhetorics in language, in this case in prosody, poetics—and its moral positionings and literary practices as sound.

#### **3. The Prosody of Time and Ethics**

Certainly, we hear and feel not only the force of time in the rhythm of a poem that is musical and performed, but we also understand how poetry uses time, as music does, to create and toy with affective and cognitive expectation of emotionally meaningful sound (see Meyer 1956; Zuckerkandl 1956; Huron 2008). But if we are especially attentive readers (or talented writers), we also can create and/or hear 'linguistic pockets of time' in the sounds of poems as human-made sonic objects. In the rhetoric of poems as human sonic objects, these linguistic pockets of time can be predicated and predicted on traditional prosodic elements of poetry, poetics (see Table 1).


**Table 1.** Pockets of linguistic time in prosody.

Poetry, especially formal poetry, uses forms and styles to explore time by routing ideas and sounds around the nooks of line breaks, the crooks of rhyme, the running repetition of expected and heard beats (meter and rhythm), the crannies of specific forms that expand and contract and reflect the back/wash of recurring refrains and rhymes, or flow steadily on. These linguistic pockets of time, these prosodic elements we create and hear in poems, become the sonic rhetorics of poems as sound. Poems as sonic objects also create aural and temporal arguments that are ethical (see Katz 2017; Stephens and Katz 2019). However, with these traditional prosodic elements we have direct but not unproblematic access to the temporal dimensions of poems as sonic objects, and their ethical arguments (see Katz 1996; Whigham 1979; Croll 1989; Measel 2020) via revealing albeit still limited analysis.<sup>2</sup> These linguistic pockets of time created in the rhetorical bodies of poems as sound do not always point outward and are not directly connected to external referents (Heidegger 1971a, 2010b). Yet rhetorically, time, invisible except to the ear, can ethically critique the referential meaning/spatial content of poem and culture. But it is almost always the case that spatial, referential meaning will 'visually overrun' the temporal dimensions of poems, which then become objects of interpretation rather than performance (Katz 1996; cf. Katz 2017; Stephens and Katz 2019). Thus, contextual content and culture is often useful or necessary to make relatively specific sense of the "meaning of music" (Meyer 1956). Thus, the temporal dimensions of poems as sonic objects are easy to rhetorically miss, especially when the content itself is highly ethically charged. The following volatile villanelle composed by the author from phrases spoken or tweeted is a "perfect" example of how the rhetoric of a poem as sonic object itself may constitute and act/enact temporally ethical arguments. Because I am going to ask you to ignore context and foreground the prosodic dimensions of time, I am going to blind the poem as much as possible. We do not have to and will not discuss the content of the poem per se. Please *listen*, and we will "see" you on the other side.

#### Untitled

"What the hell's happening out there in space? Believe me, there's no man-made climate change! My people tell me it's a big disgrace!"

"Mar's next—best people—I don't care race. A Space Force will also be tremendous. So what the hell is happening in space?"

"They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime—that face!

<sup>2</sup> How do we research and talk about time without destroying it by our literary and rhetorical methods of analysis and practice, which seem to always remain grounded in Newtonian space-time modes of consciousness, just as New Physics is? (Katz 1996, 2015b). In keeping with both Heidegger and Levinas, I would say that the first ethical action that sound (whether natural, voice, musical instruments, machines, writing) demands of us as conscious beings is the imperative to listen attentively, to really hear, to respond in kind, to perform, to practice in life. One answer to the question how to avoid destroying time (and affect) with our methods is to ground our methods in poetry (Heidegger 1971b, 2010b, 2014), although in terms of ethics and essence I think that Levinas as well reveals the paradoxicality of this proposition (e.g., Levinas 1981).

We have no borders; they're laughing at us! Many say it's a terrible disgrace."

"The Putin witch hunt is a huge mistake. If you're listening, let's be friends, Russia. (But what the hell is going on in space?)"

"The news is all made up, totally fake! There's no obstruction, no collusion, no quid pro quo. It's a hoax, witch hunt, disaster, disgrace!"

"No puppet, no puppet: I will invade, any sh' holes with oil if they don't have white folks. Just look what's happening in outer space."

"I'm like a genius—a very high IQ—smarter than, than my generals! Who knew it would be so complex? Fine people on both sides: it's a disgrace."

"I'm shutting down the government, closing the border, will separate families to prevent more American carnage. And also what happens in outer space."

"We need to build that wall; but who will pay? Mexico!! Our nation's being overrun by savages! It's a sin, what's happening, a disgrace."

"I read somewhere, and I'll say it again: Wouldn't it be great if Putin were our friend? Then what the hell is happening in space? Whatever. It's a total disgrace."

It is very difficult to get beyond the speaker and the referential–ethical meaning expressed here (they are right in your *face*—and not in a Levinasian way (Davis 2010), but rather the opposite). But can you hear time through the screed? Much of the poem is obviously referential, a dialogic interaction between the personal/cultural sphere of affect/art and the public/political sphere of discourse that does the rhetorical work of criticism and raises ethical questions all on its own. But if we stop there, prosody will teach us nothing about time and ethics in the language of the poem as a sonic object. The literary form of the villanelle in all its temporal dimensions, holds and remolds, squeezes, cajoles, and critiques the referential and contextual content of the poem. The villanelle qua rhetorical–ethical action temporally manipulates and comments through overall form (musical organization), line length and breaks (duration), rhythm and meter (time in rhetoric), and the sonic repetition of refrain and rhyme pattern (rhetoric in time). These temporal dimensions (as prosodic pockets) of poems—sonic objects made out of language—critique content and each other in real time.


The villanelle as a sonic object *in language*—including and particularly its overall form and style, its refrains, its rhyme scheme, and its line lengths and breaks—is a direct temporal form of ethical criticism, which Cicero knew was a "natural intuition possessed by everyone" (1942) and the final arbiter of truth (1939). And it is a good thing that it is natural, for who reads at this level but literary and rhetorical scholars? While many of the sound effects are obvious to us, and have some kind of affective effect on listeners or readers, the temporal "value" of poetry as sonic objects are rhetorically more esoteric and obscure than ordinary language use, where the sound is still heard but the ethical role of time is often hidden and goes undetected.

#### **4. Deep Sound, Time, and Ethics**

While not as theorized as prosody which becomes a basis for understanding the sonic rhetorics of poetic objects, or as historically tectonic as the significant variations and *Weltanschauungen* of different languages, there are also multidimensional pockets of linguistic time created by and contained in the etymology of words—what we might refer to as 'deep sound'. These pockets of time are not merely the result of the chronological development of the denotations and connotations of words spoken and written in any language, but also are temporal distortions of diction that result with the always "inaccurate" and already metaphorical usage of each word and its vicinity, at each layer of linguistic history. Because of the passage and upheavals of history, local time distortions of meaning, with ethical implications, also can be seen in attempts at translation, which are usually problematic but also revelatory.

For an apt example of a discussion about music and language in classical Greek, let us turn to W. D. Woodhouse's translation of the Plato's *Gorgias* (Plato 1961b). There (502c-d) Plato has Socrates ask:

"ϕερε δ ´ η´, εϥ τις περιελ´ oι τη˜ς πoιησεω ´ ς παση ´ ς τó τε μελ´ oς και τ` o`ν Ϲυθμo`ν και τ` o` μετρ ´ oν, Ωλλo τι ύ λóγoι γι´γνoνται τo` λειπóμενoν"

(phere de, ei tis perieloi t ¯ es poi ¯ ese ¯ os pas ¯ es to te melos kai ton rhythmon kai to metron, allo ti ¯ e logoi gignontai to leipomenon) ¯

"[I]f you strip [περιε´λoι" (perriéloi); inf. Περιαιρε´ω] poetry of its music and rhythm and meter, wouldn't what remains be nothing but speech?"

If we "take a moment" to focus on the Greek word Plato uses for "strip" here, "περιε´λoι," we might strain to hear other dimensions of time—not only just below the surface, in the chronological, etymological history and/or the surrounding grammar of each word, but in translations as well. (Indeed, coded deeply beneath any text is the creation of "other texts" based on the long history of each word and their differential relations, but now newly assembled, although their organization is far less coherent or intelligible. This temporal 'subtext' is further concealed by translation, as well as contemporary usage—but is always and necessarily present nevertheless—a hermeneutic dimension of texts that Heidegger was acutely aware and made central to his philosophy.)

These hidden dimensions of linguistic time, located around, under, and through each word and its grammatical usage, can be understood as pockets of sonic rhetorics. The sonic rhetorics created by etymologies (in translation or not) are based not only on *horizontal duration,* as is the case in poetry (e.g., the line), but also on *vertical duration* and extension, which is also the way metaphor works (Boyd 1993; see Appendix A). In this case, the act of stripping is vertically ordered in Table 2 by my admittedly subjective judgment concerning the increasing velocity of the denotation and connotations of the translation of "strip." Here, the relative and 'ethical soundings' of the language becomes equated with the speed and thus violence of the rhetorical act. (The detail in Table 2 was gleaned and quoted from the Tufts University's Perseus Project/Greek Word Study Tool (2019)).


**Table 2.** Etymological pockets of time in translations of the Greek word περιελ´ *o*ι, "strip".

My point if not my argument here is that the length of time it takes to say a word, or to say it in translation, bears some relation to and in effect temporally recreates/represents for listener or reader the experience as a sensuous movement of sound as intellectual content in consciousness (Cassirer 1955), or as a "symbolic act" (Burke 1966), and so has at least some validity, since the act is taking place through the sonic rhetorics of language—the sound of the words. The same sonic reality occurs when you look up other possible Greek verbs for "strip." The alternate words/translations not only point to different grammatical relations, spatial referents, and sometimes wildly different meanings, but also contain in themselves actions of varying durations as part of their definitions, highlighting not only the difficulty of translation but also the varying temporal dimensions of meaning, and their ethical import in a text. (I deliberately discuss the sonic rhetorics created by etymological time and velocity of words rather than the grammar of verb tenses in classical Greek. The next section looks at Hebrew grammar.)

#### **5. Ethical Letters and the Sonic Creation of Time**

There seems to be another rhetorical tradition, rooted in another classical language, in which time as well as space are believed to be created in language itself, by and through the letters of the alphabet—a sonic rhetorics in which the world is text, reality (already) written. I am not talking about postmodernism, with its focus on signification without final signifieds, although they are closely related through scholars like Derrida (1976), Handelman (1983), and Bloom (1975) and in part are derived from this ancient language and tradition begun over 5781 years ago and still used in sects of different religions, although relatively unknown outside the Jewish religion. This sonic rhetorical dimension of language and grammar, and the alphabet itself, though often heard, is relatively unknown or not understood, even by the Jewish people, many of whom nevertheless participate in it in services and rituals, or hear it in sermons without realizing its rhetorical significance (Katz 1995a, 1995b, 2003, 2004). (This was partly deliberate, as the ancient rabbis, sages, and mystics treated this knowledge as sacred, dangerous, forbidden knowledge). As Joseph Dan (1998) comments, it is very difficult to flip the relation of language and reality, and to think that texts spoken and written are reality—sonic reality I would add—and that the physical objects in the world are the signifiers. This Jewish tradition is not only ancient, but also deep and rich, and I will only have time to barely scratch the surface of one letter, and point to some other work I have done for those interested. I have dubbed this tradition "the rhetoric of the Hebrew alefbet," a Jewish mainstream theory and practice perhaps somewhat different in its persistence if not wholly unique from the Greek and Roman hegemonic one we have inherited, and a theory and practice still adhered to in different ways in different branches of Judaism today.

In past work, I have argued that the rhetoric of the Hebrew alefbet might constitute an ontological, or perhaps more precisely, an orthographic basis for what I have called a "Jewish sophistic" (Katz 2009). In "The Epistemology of the Kabbalah: Toward a Jewish Philosophy of Rhetoric" (Katz 1995a), I argued that based on the alefbet, this Jewish sophistic, not chronologically but philosophically, generally speaking would fall somewhere between Platonic and sophistic epistemological positions. Further, I have examined how the Hebrew Bible (the *Tanakh*) itself might constitute or at least represent a rhetorical "theory" quite different from most Greek and Roman concepts of persuasion (Katz 1995b, 2003, 2015a). And like Harold Bloom's reading of the Kabbalah in *Kabbalah and Criticism* (1990), we might read this tradition—begun in the opening words of the *Tanakh*—with a set of hermeneutical principles known as the *Baraita of the 32 Rules* (see Strack and Stemberger 1996; Katz 2015a). Without getting into detail or going into depth, these principles were developed through the Rabbinic period (200 BCE–400 CE) while under Roman occupation, along with more fanciful Midrash (and to a lesser extent in the more legalistic and logical Talmud), and perhaps reached their fullest fruition in the various Kabbalistic texts that arose from the 1st through the 16th centuries. Alive and still learned, practiced and actively used today in sermons of all denominations, the latter five of these hermeneutic principles in particular might seem for us to be part of a different "sophistic" rhetorical tradition. For believers, these hermeneutic principles are not merely concerned with invention and persuasion, but also and ultimately with creation. And not merely the creation of 'social-epistemic' reality, but of *physical reality*—the entire material universe, space and time included.

In three major religions that draw on the *Tanakh*, G/d, creates the world/universe in the first line of Genesis (read right to left): ʵʸʓʠʙʕʤʺʕ ʠ६ʒʥʭʍ ʩʑʮफ़ʔˉʕ ʤʺʔ ʠʭʩ ६ʒ ʤ˄ख़ʑ ʠʠʎ ʸ४ʕˎʺʩ <sup>ʕ</sup> ˇʠफ़ʑ ʸʒˎʍ <sup>←</sup> (Bereshith bara Elohim eth hashshamayim v'eth ha'arets). "In the beginning G/d created the heaven and the earth." And how does <sup>G</sup>/d do this? Simply by speaking: ʸˣʠʚʩ <sup>ʙ</sup> ʤʑ ʩʍ ʥʸˣ ʙʔ ʠʚʩ <sup>ख़</sup> ʤʑ ʩʭʩ <sup>ʍ</sup> ʤ˄फ़ʑ ʠʸ <sup>ʎ</sup> ʮʠʓ ʖ˕६ʥʔ<sup>←</sup> (Vayyomer Elohim yehi-or vayehi-or) "And G/d said 'Let there be light and there was light'." *G*/*d speaks creation into being.* (Some mystics believe that G/d merely opened his/her mouth, and out of this divine silent sonic act the universe was born.) In this rendition of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, G/d is the master rhetorician. This is the ultimate power of rhetoric for which rhetoricians long—to create not just symbolic action, consubstantiality, a social construction of reality, but "*physical reality" itself* see (Burke 1952, 1966; Handelman 1983). Further, in the Jewish tradition, especially the esoteric (and guarded) mystical one of Kabbalah, God does not just speak creation; G/d *writes* it down beforehand, using the Hebrew alefbet. In Judaism, as in

postmodernism, (e.g., Derrida 1976), the world is already written! And it is "settled" convention that writing literally comes first: Moses was given not only the Ten Commandments, but also the *written Torah* on Mt. Sinai; or Moses wrote it down; or ... (see Handelman 1983; Katz 2003). The Oral Torah was compiled *much later*, during the Rabbinic period, finally giving us the Talmud.

As I have also suggested, the Jewish G/d is thus 'the ultimate sophist' (Katz 2009). *En arkhêi ên ho Logos*—"In the beginning was the Word" *John* (1:1) declares. But in Judaism, the Word is not made flesh for sacrifice and redemption, as it is in Christianity; the Word remains language, the world a sonic rhetorics—the coughing, smoldering, broken, cryptic, musical remnants of spoken and written letters left over from the first act of linguistic creation: the language of the universe. G/d grows more and more distant and eventually disappears in the original Hebrew Bible when compared to Christian versions of "The Old Testament" (Miles 1995); only the alefbet remains. In Judaism, G/d is ultimately unknowable, as well as quite changeable (Miles 1995). And in Hebrew, G/d's holiest 'incarnation' is a Name, the Tetragrammaton *yud*, *hey*, *vov*, *hey* (Figure 1):

**Figure 1.** The Tetragrammaton (read right to left).

This Name, usually transliterated as Jehovah or Yahweh, is literally unsayable—physically as well as by taboo and tradition. This too is "sonic." But what does it have to do with time and ethics? In Kabbalah and the mystical tradition generally within Judaism (as well as in astrophysics (Hawking 1988)), creation starts with the smallest point possible, in the *Eyn-Sof*—the inconceivable "nothingness," which is also G/d). This is a sonic rhetorics of hidden temporalities "in ethical action"—the sound of language/reality itself as spoken by G/d, and reembodied in the Torah and Talmud, and in every letter of the alefbet. To conclude our discussion, then, let us focus on just one letter—the third of the four letters of the Tetragrammaton, *vov*—in itself, and in relation to the other three letters of the Tetragrammaton, and the sixth letter of the Hebrew alphabet with which by some accounts G/d created the universe. In Kabbalah, and the mystical tradition generally within Judaism, creation starts with a point, the smallest of the Hebrew letters, the Hebrew letter, *yud*— —and extends and expands outward, and then down through the *vov*: . As Harralick writes,

[T]he [*yud* is in a] state of concealment and obscurity, before it develops into a state of expansion and revelation in comprehension and understanding. When the "point" evolves into a state of expansion and revelation [ ... ] it is then contained and represented in the letter ၥ[*hey*]. The shape of the letter ၥ[*hey*] has dimension, expansion, breadth [ ... ] to indicate extension and flow downward to the concealed worlds. In the next stage this extension and flow are drawn still lower into the revealed worlds [ ... ]. This stage of extension is contained and represented in the final letters [*vov*] and ၥ [*hey* ... ]. [*vov*], in shape a vertical line, indicates downward extension. (Zalman, qtd. In Haralick 1995, p. 156)

One result of this interpretation or "drash" on the letter *vov*/the Tetragrammaton, is that in it we hear that G/d creates the entire universe and everything in it, including all time and space through the speaking and/or insertion of the letter of the Name into nothingness, into the void (Figure 2).

**Figure 2.** The *Vov* and Moral Space-Time.

I have dubbed the massive explosion of letters as objects and events that followed this sonic rhetorical act the 'Jewish big-bang theory' (Katz 2003). This hidden linguistic act sonically creates a rhetorical and physical reality, a spatial–temporal and still expanding realm as an orthographic, moral universe where the Hebrew letters themselves are presumed to be ethical, sacred, holy, and are treated as such by the observant (see Katz 1995a, 2003, 2004). In another Kabbalistic tradition, that of Rabbi Isaac Luria, the omnipresent G/d must withdraw from a tiny space in order to allow room for the creation of the universe (Vital 1999; cf. Burke 1966). In sonic production terms, this rhetorical physical act might be akin to creating, in the nothingness of a digital file, the necessary "acoustic room" into which sound or writing can then be recorded. One might relate this to Levinas' philosophy of ethics (*passim*) as well, where time (and space) are necessary for the possibility of *Alterity*, which might lead to the face of the Other(s), and ultimately G/d ... but probably not all of G/d, for Levinas' philosophy can be understood at least in part to derive in complex ways from Jewish tradition as well (e.g., Levinas 1981, 1990a, 1990b, 1998).

But there is another sonic feature of the Hebrew letter *vov* that involves issues of grammar and interpretation. The *vov* is almost always translated as the conjunction "and," and can be attached to almost any word. Grammatically, "AND" is a coordinate conjunction; it makes things equal. "And" is also a time referent, a temporal marker (a sentence that begins with "And" explicitly implies that something came before: "And G/d said ... "). And "and" can rhetorically create the *illusion* of simultaneity in language, a medium that unfolds lineally. And think about the figure of speech, *polysyndeton*, and the deliberate repetition of coordinate conjunctions (Quinn 1995): "and" rhetorically creates a sense of multiplicity, of prolixity, of procreation, if for no other reason than because there are literally more words! In the King James version of the Bible, the *vov* is translated as "and," giving us all of these conjunctions:

And God said: "Let there be light." And there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day. And God said: "Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters." And God made the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament; and it was so. And God called the firmament heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, a second day. *Bereshith* (Genesis) 1:1–1:8

But in Biblical Hebrew, *vov* has several additional grammatical functions that relate to sonic rhetorics in fundamental ways. In one of these functions, *vov* ʪʩʴʤʤ*Hahipuch* (the "*vov* of reversal," also called the "*vov* conversive," or the "*vov* consecutive") not only gives us all those conjunctions "and," but also when attached to a verb can shift its tense (a temporal dimension of Hebrew totally lost in translation). When the *vov* of reversal is attached to a past tense verb (the perfect tense because the action is completed), the *vov* often changes the past tense in Biblical Hebrew into the future tense (the imperfect tense), and vice versa. We have already seen this: ʸˣʠʚʩ ʙ ʤʑ ʩʍʥʸˣ ʙʔ ʠʚʩ ख़ ʤʑ ʩʍ ← (yehi-or vayehi-or) "Let there be light and there was light." Note that in Hebrew the form of the verb (highlighted in green) is the same in both cases: the first, future/imperfect tense (used as an imperative), preceded by the *vov* of reversal, is repeated in the same form, even though it is translated in and out of Hebrew as if it were past/perfect tense (which would be ʺʥʩʤ*haya*—"there was"). Without the grammatical *vov* of reversal, or its sonic rhetorical effect, the translation would read, and we would hear: Let there be light and there will be light. (Heresy!)

This kind of detail regarding the grammatical and rhetorical functions of letters and parts of letters is very typical of the rabbis of Talmud and Midrash (see Handelman 1983; Katz 2015a). But why and how is this significant for us? Because this "theory" sonic rhetorics and time is built right into the grammar and alphabet of Biblical Hebrew, into the letter *vov*. The effect of this rhetoric of the alphabet, in this instance alone, is to create not only an alternate rhetorical theory and tradition, but timelessness, eternity in the text. And with Levinas, an originary letter to which to *respond* (cf. Davis 2010). Because of *vov* of reversal, in Biblical Hebrew, the first act of creation in the Five Books of Moses, through the Prophets, to the last pages of the Writings, has happened, is happening, will always happen! (We see this in the Passover seder, for instance, where G/d annually frees the contemporary reader/celebrant from bondage in Egypt.)

This essay is not a Luddite, or perhaps more accurately, Antediluvian tract on sonic rhetorics. I have written before on the possible relations of the rhetoric and/or hermeneutics of the Hebrew alphabet, Object-Oriented Philosophy, and the Anthropocene (Katz 2015a, 2015b). The grammar of the Hebrew alefbet itself, every letter about which innumerable tomes have been written, constitutes a hidden temporal, ethical, sonic rhetoric, one that underlies Jewish rhetoric and religion and still informs Jewish teaching and scholarship today. The meaning of the *vov* of reversal is not without its controversies, of course (cf. Weingreen 1959; Cook 2010; Bamildele 2014). But if we accept *vov* as a *grammatical* inflection, the rhetorical effect of all the *vovim* is to create timelessness, making everything in the Hebrew Bible always present, always sounding, always occurring.

As we have discussed, a "preoriginary obligation" (Davis 2010), the inessential ground of ethical relations for Levinas hints at a prelinguistic and thus perhaps a divine or sacred moral source. And G/d certainly does figure in a lot of Levinas' work (Levinas 1990a, 1990b, 1998). In this context, the Hebrew letters also can be considered to be "preorginary" (as they are for many orthodox, Chasidic, and other Jews), an infinite but also pre-primordial mystical alphabet out of which writing and speaking a sonic moral space-time is born (see Katz 2003). One does not have to believe in the Hebrew G/d, or even that language is reality, to understand the power of the language, such as sacred pledge of the oath, for example (Agamben 2011). The hidden temporality of the Hebrew alefbet "appears" to be a theory of sonic rhetoric as an orthographic-material reality, one that by its operations and origins is often assumed to be ethical. Is it a sonic rhetorical theory in which language is not only a manifestation of time, but the cause and content of it; a sonic rhetorical theory in which language is a moral reality? ʯʥʶʸʩʤʑ ʩʍʯʷ *Ken y'hi ratzon*: "May it be so."

#### **Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Acknowledgments:** Much earlier versions of parts of this essay were presented at the "Roundtable on Rhetorical Temporalities" with Diane Davis, Thomas Rickert, Michelle Ballif, and Daniel Gross, at the Rhetoric Society of America Conference, Minneapolis, MN, 31 May 2018; and at the session "Temporalities in Transition: The Epistemic Music of Rhetoric by Steven B Katz—22 Years Later. An Interview-Performance," with Mari Ramler, Michael David Measel, and Amy Patterson, at the "Symposium on Sound, Rhetoric, and Writing," organized by Steph Ceraso, Eric Detweiler, Joel Overall, and Jon Stone at Belmont University, Nashville, TN, and Middle

Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN, 7–8 September 2018. The author wishes to thank all these fellow participants and organizers for their formative contribution to his thinking, and others in attendance who offered valuable suggestions. The author wishes to acknowledge in great appreciation the very specific and extremely useful comments of the two anonymous peer reviewers for Humanities, which helped him immensely in revising and (re)focusing this essay. Penultimate but not least, the author gratefully acknowledges the tireless work of Addy Enlow for her earlier help as Research Assistant with the graphics in both presentations, and many other important little matters too numerable to name. Finally, the author (especially and again) wishes to express his sincere gratitude for the generous advice and ongoing assistance of Professor Adam Newton, Special Editor of this issue of Humanities, for his brilliant insight and guidance in bringing this second article to print, and for his continuing support and friendship. Any errors in fact or judgment are mine.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

#### **Appendix A**

**Figure A1.** Metaphor Extension in Superstring Theory.

Superstring Theory attempts to address the problem of "complementarity"—the particle or wave phenomenon, among others—in quantum mechanics (Bohr 2010; Heisenberg 1958). In the 'metaphorical proposition' "Elementary particles are strings," the metaphor of the "string" is used to *extend* the concept of "elementary particles." Properties that belong to string are *transferred* to the concept of elementary particles as a way of understanding and even measuring the particles, and developing Superstring Theory. Because a string has extension, a subatomic particle has extension; because they have extension, they can vibrate; vibration can be measured in frequencies, which can be quantified and mathematical models created, etc. This is only the very beginning of this metaphor, and Superstring Theory. The same question about metaphor extension may apply to sonic rhetorics: Do we ever get out of our metaphorical models, to the "actual" substance/causal structures of the world? (Based on Greene 1986; cf. Boyd 1993; Kuhn 1993).

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