Dilemmas Beyond Ethics: A 
Critique of Eastern Ethical Literary 
Criticism
Arleen Ionescu
West University of Timis oara, Faculty of Letters, History, Philosophy and Theology, Department of 
Foreign Languages and Literatures, Bulevardul Vasile Pârvan 4, Timis oara 300223, Romania
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5764-8612 
arleen.ionescu@e-uvt.ro
The aim of this article is to compare ethical literary criticism of the East with 
that of the West and to reveal some potential limitations of the emerging critical 
tendency of “ethical literary criticism” in China when applied to Western literary 
production. The first part sets out the conceptual framework by contrasting Nie 
Zhenzhao’s understanding of literature as an expression of ethics, Jacques 
Derrida’s conception of the institution of “literature” as having “the right to say 
anything,” and Levinas’s conception of ethics as “first philosophy” involving 
responsibility towards the Other, bearing in mind that Levinas’s entire 
philosophical project was an ethical response to all forms of “absolute evil” that 
emerged in the twentieth century. Starting from this contextual definition, the 
article focuses on the opening of history after the Second World War as a “caesura” 
(Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe) to show that while Nie’s application of ethics to 
literary analysis can work successfully for a corpus of works from the Middle Ages 
to nineteenth-century realism, his concept of “ethical choice” as an analytical 
fulcrum breaks down in the face of literature’s response to twentieth-century 
atrocities. In the final section, therefore, I challenge Nie’s ethical literary criticism 
by focusing on works in the tradition of the “Holocaust novel” and presenting 
a case study that demonstrates the limits of ethical criticism in the analysis of 
William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice.
Keywords: literature and ethics / ethical literary criticism / East and West / Nie, 
Zhenzhao / Derrida, Jacques / Levinas, Emmanuel / Styron, William: Sophie’s Choice
165
Primerjalna književnost (Ljubljana) 47.3 (2024)
Does the East meet the West in critical theory?
Recently, more bridges between the East, in particular China, and 
the West have been established in the field of the Humanities, fol-
lowing many collaborations between Asian, European, American and 
Australian researchers in sciences. More translations from English 
PKn, letnik 47, št. 3, Ljubljana, november 2024
166
into Chinese and from Chinese into English appeared. Many inter-
national journals have shown an increased interest in making it pos-
sible for modern Chinese fiction and theory to become global (see, for 
instance, guest-edited issues, such as Wang, Modern Chinese Fiction, 
Comparative Literature, and Modern China; Hu-DeHart et al.; Wang 
and Peng).
As also mentioned by Tomo Virk, an emerging critical trend called 
“ethical literary criticism” appeared in China in 2004, mainly through 
the works of Nie Zhenzhao (Virk, “Kitajska različica”). Aware that some 
of my points overlap with Virk’s, yet in a dialogue with him, meant 
to contextualize my findings, I will briefly mention the main tenets 
of Nie’s ethical criticism. After Foreign Literature Studies published 
several Nie’s articles written in Chinese (Nie, “Ethical Approach,” 
“Ethical Literary Criticism: On Fundamental Function,” and “Ethical 
Literary Criticism: Its Fundaments”), some of his works were trans-
lated into English (Nie, “Towards an Ethical Literary Criticism”; Nie 
and Shang). Others were analyzed in English (Tian; Yang).1 Junwu 
Tian explained that by the time Nie came up with his theory, China 
was in a “theory aphasia,” caused by “the lack of an independent system 
of its own discourse” which “subordinated Western ethical criticism 
to other theories, such as narratology and ecocriticism” (Tian 406). 
The term “theory aphasia” coined by critic Cao Shunqing described 
“the cultural symptoms of Chinese literary criticism” (403). Nie set up 
his own “theoretical system of ethical literary criticism,” attempting to 
enrich and perfect “the existing ethical criticism” (406) by assessing 
the values of literary texts within a specific social and cultural context.2 
In December 2012, Yichang hosted the 2nd International Symposium 
on Ethical Literary Criticism where the International Association for 
Ethical Literary Criticism (IAELC) was set up as “an international lit-
erary and cultural organization which aims to link all those working in 
ethical literary criticism in theory and practice and to encourage the 
discussion of ethical value in literary creation and criticism.” Its current 
president is Nie.
Nie’s 2014 book Introduction to Ethical Literary Criticism, which 
was translated into English in 2024, is made up of three main parts: 
1 Virk also engages with Junwu Tian’s article, while he does not mention Liu Yang.
2 Starting from Tian, Virk explained that Nie’s theory is rooted in Chinese tradi-
tion, which may seem unfamiliar to the Western reader. He agrees with Tian that Nie’s 
emphasis is on “the ethical and educational function of literature and art” in general 
(Virk, “Kitajska različica” 223). I am exactly on the same page as Virk and in the next 
part I will elaborate further on the relation of Nie’s theory to Confucianism.
Arleen Ionescu:      A Critique of Eastern Ethical Literary Criticism
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a theoretical exploration of ethical literary criticism which argues that 
“literature is an art of ethics,” followed by “applications of ethical lit-
erary criticism, and its conceptual system” (Yang 172) which include 
analyses of Oedipus Rex, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, “The Old Man and 
the Sea,” Mourning Becomes Electra, and the poetry of the May Fourth 
Movement (a Chinese cultural and anti-imperialist political movement 
that started from student protests in Beijing on May 4, 1919).
In 2017, one of the issues of the journal Primerjalna književnost was 
dedicated to ethical criticism. The editors Špela Virant and Irena Samide 
proposed three different directions to approach ethics in criticism: “the 
ethicality of imagination, the ethicality of narration, and the ethicality 
of interpretation” (Virant and Samide 7). In the same issue, Virk made 
a comprehensive synthesis of the latest productions in ethical criticism 
and included Nie’s theory among those directions “that branched into 
a series of individual directions, the most prominent of which are nar-
rative ethics, rhetorical literary ethics, ethics of reading and ethics of 
otherness, along with others, such as ethics of writing, ethics of fiction, 
ethics of difference, ethics of criticism, ethics of interpretation, ethics 
of world literature, ethics of imagination, ethics of hypertext, ethics of 
empathy, etc.”—a “potentially endless” list as he called it, pointing out 
that this “plurality” can end up in “cacophony” (Virk, “Etična literarna 
veda” 15).
Setting the conceptual stage
Nie’s “ethical literary criticism” sees literature as “a product of ethic, 
or a unique expression of morality in a given historical period” (Nie, 
“Towards an Ethical Literary Criticism” 85). Hence, Nie’s work inves-
tigates writers’ moral values, the relations between the moral phenom-
ena of literary works and reality, and the effects of the works’ moral val-
ues on readers and society (see also Shang, “Rise”). And here comes the 
first difference between Eastern and Western ethical criticism: while 
Western ethics is of a more complex nature, Eastern ethics is often 
equated to morality. Tian asserts that for Nie “moral criticism func-
tions as a lawful censorship, emphasizing the moral edification of lit-
erature, while ethical criticism behaves like a nonteleological historian, 
realistically recording and revealing the ethical relationships among lit-
erary characters without arbitrary judgments” (Tian 411–412). Thus, 
Homer’s and Hesiod’s stories of incest present immoral behaviors, 
yet Homer and Hesiod are not immoral, since their purpose was to 
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“artistically represent the ethical chaos of that period” (412). A clearer 
explanation is provided by Galin Tihanov in one of the two forewords 
to Nie’s Introduction to Ethical Literary Criticism. Tihanov asserts that 
there is a difference between moral and ethical criticism, “the former 
being guided by the need to pass judgement from the commentator’s/
reader’s current perspective, while the latter sets out to understand the 
specific evolution of literature as a tool of facing and resolving dilem-
mas around good and evil, duty and pleasure, loyalty and freedom, 
and so on” (Tihanov xi; see also Virk, “Kitajska različica” 217–218). 
However, Tihanov’s comments are contradicted by Nie’s book itself in 
which morality and ethics are often interchangeable. Here are only a 
few examples:
Ethical literary criticism differs from other strands of literary criticism in its 
view of the origin of literature, by claiming that literature is a product of 
ethics, or a unique expression of morality in a given historical period. (Nie, 
Introduction 8)
The emergences of taboos signify the early formation of morality. … The for-
mation and transformation of the ethical order of human society is institu-
tionally premised on taboos. (15)
[T]he literature of Realism and Sentimentalism are inevitably engaged with 
morality with a special focus on moral model. It is fair to conclude that the 
ethical concerns of literary criticism are defined by the ethical value of litera-
ture. (73)
To quote Laurent Milesi, there is a
tendency to inadvertently rehabilitate two types of “moralizing” or ideological 
approaches that had prevailed in the West at a much earlier stage in the devel-
opment of literary criticism, albeit at opposite ends of the political/ideological 
spectrum: F. R. Leavis’s emphasis on the universalizing “moral significance” of 
the “Great Tradition” vs. Georg Lukács’s “ethics of representation” (my terms) 
in his advocacy of a socialist-realist aesthetics (and debunking of modernism 
as bourgeois decadence). (Milesi, “Bringing the Ethos”)
In other words, if a revival of these theories is at stake nowadays, there 
is also a strong “necessity of re-grounding ethics in its original ethos.”
Tian attempts to convince us that “Nie’s theory of ethical literary 
criticism has won critical acclaims from scholars, both Chinese and 
foreign,” giving several examples of academics who showed interest 
in his theory according to an article co-authored by William Baker 
Arleen Ionescu:      A Critique of Eastern Ethical Literary Criticism
169
and Biwu Shang for Times Literary Supplement (Tian 413; see also 
Lazer). Baker and Shang indeed spoke of ethical literary criticism 
as becoming “one of the most vibrant and productive critical the-
ories in China,” receiving “increasing recognition” from “eminent 
scholars” (Baker and Shang 15). However, Western scholars have a 
more nuanced notion of ethics which differs fundamentally from the 
huge number of teachings and moral lessons of Laozi and Confucius. 
Assuming the risk of taking perhaps too many shortcuts here, to make 
my point clear, I would say that Chinese culture can be regarded as 
a culture of stories and narratives. The shi (“poetry”)—“the main-
stream along the long river of Chinese ancient literature” (Liu 93)—
tells stories. Laozi’s and Confucius’s teachings are based on concrete 
stories from which morals are extracted. The title of Laozi’s main 
work, Daodejing, is composed of the words dao (“way,” “road,” or 
“path”) and dejing which comes from de (“life force” or “vitality”). 
The figure of the Sage in Daodejing is “the person who epitomizes 
the teachings of a particular school of philosophy, how he should 
behave depends, of course, on the nature of the teachings concerned” 
(Penny xii). Moreover, according to Xinzhong Yao, “Confucianism 
underlined, and perhaps to a smaller extent continues to underline, 
the basic structure of society and community, to orient the life of 
the people and to define their moral standards and ethical ideal in 
most parts of East Asia” (Yao 32). The close connection between 
Confucius’s thinking and ethics made several Western scholars define 
Confucianism as a form of ethics (Needham; Zaehner; see also Yao 
32). Because the epic genre prevails in Chinese literature, narratol-
ogy is omnipresent in Chinese scholarship. Nowadays, postclassical 
narratology “is far from being merely an American affair since, after 
Critical Theory entered the study of narratives in China, Chinese 
academics not only welcomed the concept but also valuably contrib-
uted to the field, including with their own home-grown version of 
narratology” (Ionescu, “Postclassical Narratology” 15; see also Shang, 
“Postclassical Narratology”).
In a co-written article with Shang, Nie acknowledges that “it is 
striking that this scholarship has so far failed to consider ethical criti-
cism as an independent discipline or school of critical theory,” and 
points out the two directions which ethical criticism has taken: “In the 
case of Emmanuel Lévinas, Maurice Blanchot, and Nussbaum, ethical 
criticism has been more or less assimilated by philosophy; in the case of 
Wayne C. Booth, James Phelan, and Adam Zachery Newton, ethical 
criticism has been assimilated by narratology” (Nie and Shang 4).
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Within the Chinese context, Nie’s theory resonates with the lat-
ter. The concepts “in the practice of ethical literary criticism” that he 
proposes “to unpack the ethical features of literary works” are “[e]thical 
taboo, ethical chaos, ethical consciousness, ethical environment, ethical 
identity, ethical choice, the Sphinx factor, the human factor, the animal 
factor, rational will, irrational will and natural will” (Nie, “Towards an 
Ethical Literary Criticism” 89). These concepts are explained through 
examples from different stories from the Bible or Greek mythology. 
For instance, “the Sphinx factor” is illustrated as follows:
The feature of the Sphinx’s combination of a human head and an animal body 
suggests, first of all, that the most important feature of a human image lies 
in its head, which stands for reason as a result of the evolutionary process. 
Secondly, it indicates that human beings have evolved from animals and thus 
still contain some features belonging to them. This feature can be thus called 
the Sphinx factor, which is composed of two parts—the human factor and the 
animal factor. Normally, the human factor is superior to the animal factor, 
and hence the former can take control of the latter, which explains why a man 
could become a person with ethical consciousness. (96)
While Chinese scholars may find the Sphinx factor a thought-provok-
ing tool to decode Chinese tales of the miraculous, such as Journey to 
the West and Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (see Tian 410), the 
Western academic is prone to interrogate these remarks, especially in 
the context of posthumanism which “rejects the idea that human be-
ings should comprise the center of research or a benchmark for measur-
ing nonhuman abilities” (Jagodzka 160). Nie’s theory dismisses animal 
life which makes his work part of what Rodolfo Piskorski defined as 
criticism that considers animal life “irrelevant or inferior” (Piskorski 
6). In the second decade of the twenty-first century, returning to the 
idea that the human being is superior to all other creatures—after so 
much research questioning “humanism’s anthropocentrism, essential-
ism, exceptionalism, and speciesism” has been produced (Herbrechter 
et al. 4)—seems anachronistic.
For Nie, “the ethical turn” which took place in narrative theory at 
the end of the 1980s and in the beginning of the 1990s in the United 
States, “attempts to unpack the ethical values of literature, and the 
truth about social life depicted in literature from an ethical perspective. 
It should be reiterated that the ethical value of literature is historical, 
stable and objective, regardless of the changes undertaken in today’s 
moral principles” (Nie, “Towards an Ethical Literary Criticism” 100). 
Nie connects this turn to the interest in narrativity. Indeed, as Liesbeth 
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Korthals Altes states, there was “a pointed interest in narrativity and 
narrative literature from the side of moral philosophy” in these two 
decades (Korthals Altes 142). Martha Nussbaum, Wayne C. Booth, 
Kevin McGinley and Daniel R. Schwartz are among the many scholars 
who suggested that literature can be read as moral philosophy or that 
the specific nature of literature implies moral exploration. Nussbaum, 
Booth, David Parker, and James Phelan also believed that “narrative 
fiction can play an important role in the moral development of readers 
by modelling their emotions, self-conception, and view of life” (143; 
see also Parker).
However, a second major difference between the Eastern and the 
Western interpretation of ethics appears here. For Western scholars, lit-
erature is “more about the failures of moral philosophy than about its 
successes” (Siebers 160). It is not a display of “moral examples for human 
beings to follow” in order “to achieve their self-perfection with moral 
experience,” as Nie sees it (Nie, “Towards an Ethical Literary Criticism” 
88). Moreover, Levinas’s work offered “an ethical justification for the 
influx into criticism of the new and challenging questions, called ‘the-
ory,’” offering “a new and different way of attending to the ethical in the 
textual, and of the responsibility inherent in reading” (Eaglestone 7).
Nie uses the concrete example “of the choice between the identities 
of animals and the identities of human beings,” bringing examples from 
Charles Darwin’s theory that accounts for the evolution of men from 
apes through the natural selection process, and from Engels’s belief 
that what differentiated human beings from animals was labor (Nie, 
“Towards an Ethical Literary Criticism” 94). However, Nie does not 
mention that many literary scholars put to the test Darwinian concepts 
of adaptation, natural selection, and survival of the fittest (see Milesi, 
“Zo(o)graphies”). Starting from the Genesis, Nie considers the differ-
ence between good and evil as “the basis of ethics” (Nie, “Towards an 
Ethical Literary Criticism” 95). He introduces the notion of ethical 
selection that Adam and Eve completed when they chose to eat the 
fruit of knowledge and claims:
All literary works embed practical aims, which are mainly about moral enlight-
enment and education. This point can be aptly demonstrated by a huge num-
ber of literary works. For instance, Homer’s poetry conveys to the reader the 
rules of living; Hesiod’s Theogony helps the reader to know the world; Greek 
tragedy teaches the reader to abide by the ethical order and moral codes. The 
process of reading is closely related to the process of aesthetic appreciation, 
which ends in the receiving of moral enlightenment. Therefore, moral teach-
ing is the fundamental function of literature. (88)
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Nie’s literary examples revolve mostly around classics: from ancient lit-
erature (Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex) and the Renaissance (Shakespeare’s 
Hamlet) to nineteenth-century Russian and French literature (Tolstoy’s 
Anna Karenina, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary). Except for D. H. Lawrence, 
Ernest Hemingway, and Eugene O’Neill, no other major twentieth-
century writers are included in Nie’s discussion. Thus, Eastern ethi-
cal criticism cannot lay claims to becoming an all-encompassing tool 
for the analysis of literature. The lack of theoretical self-reflection of 
Eastern ethical criticism is conspicuous, since Nie never acknowledges 
that in the twentieth-century Western world, ethical criticism is not 
exclusively reducible to the differences between good and evil but it 
also implies the obligation, responsibility that a certain author or reader 
takes when engaging in an act of writing or reading.
Nie’s glossary to the Introduction to Ethical Literary Criticism con-
tains the term “ethical deconstruction” which “refers to the analysis 
and interpretation of the ethical structure of literary works” (Nie, 
Introduction 221). Nie contrasts “construction” to “deconstruction” 
without mentioning that deconstruction already contains the prefix 
“con” and is therefore not the opposite of “construction”: “While ethi-
cal construction reveals the ethical structure, ethical deconstruction is 
a critical reading of the ethical structure with an aim to interpret its 
formative process” (221). Nie is paying lip service to the term “decon-
struction” here, which brings us to what deconstruction means.
In his introduction to Jacques Derrida’s Acts of Literature, Derek 
Attridge pointed out that literary texts “are acts of writing that call 
forth acts of reading” (Attridge 2). For Derrida, literature is a “histori-
cal institution with its conventions, rules, etc., but also this institution 
of fiction which gives in principle the power to say everything, to break 
free of the rules, to displace them, and thereby to institute, to invent 
and even to suspect the traditional difference between nature and insti-
tution, nature and conventional law, nature and history” (Derrida, 
“This Strange Institution” 37). The link of the institution of litera-
ture “to an authorization to say everything” means that the writer is 
given license to say anything he wanted or could say, while remaining 
shielded from all censorship, be it religious or political (37). Derrida’s 
writing on literary texts was itself a form of ethics, which brought about 
“a strong sense of his responsibility toward them, the registering of a 
demand which they and their signatories make, of a call that seems to 
come from somewhere outside the orbit within which we comfortably 
go about our intellectual business—but an outside which cannot sim-
ply be classified as exterior” (Attridge 5). For Derrida, ethics implied a 
Arleen Ionescu:      A Critique of Eastern Ethical Literary Criticism
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responsibility towards the other, and, in relation to reading literature, it 
was a law that bound him to devote himself or to respond. That law was 
“the text of the other, its very singularity, its idiom, its appeal” (Derrida, 
“This Strange Institution” 66). As Martin Hägglund has argued, 
Derrida’s “relation to the other” was grounded in a violent, “nonethical 
opening of ethics” (Hägglund 88). Derrida explained this violence as fol-
lows: “I cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even 
the love of another without sacrificing the other other, the other others. 
Every other (one) is every (bit) other [tout autre est tout autre], every one else 
is completely or wholly other” (Derrida, Gift 68). According to him, as 
Milesi showed, ethics was “ultimately singularly unjustifiable, the pos-
sibility of an impossibility, and its intrinsic violence once it is unleashed 
through a decisional act is … registered in this asymmetrical formula 
which ruptures the same from within a homology” (Milesi, “Breaching 
Ethics”). Ethics thus represents the link between alterity and singularity 
or “what one could call the universal exception or the law of the excep-
tion” (Derrida, Gift 87).
Responsibility founded in the non-reciprocal relation to the Other 
(Autrui), who takes precedence over “I,” was essential to Emmanuel 
Levinas’s philosophy. The Levinasian view of ethics as “first philoso-
phy” involves responsibility to the Other, a “language, that is, respon-
sibility” (Levinas, “Ego” 43). For Levinas, ethics was “not a moment 
of being” but “otherwise and better than being” (Levinas, “God” 165). 
With ethics, Levinas took further the project of phenomenology, 
grounded more in perception than critical reflection. As confirmed in 
Totality and Infinity, Levinas’s attempt was not to construct an ethics 
but to find its sense (34–50). To live “otherwise than being” meant for 
Levinas to live as “an ethical creature,” or, as Michael Fagenblat put it, 
“to bear witness … to the undeclinable goodness of an exposure to the 
other that precedes self-identity and thus testifies, despite oneself, to 
the glory of the Good” (Fagenblat 197).
The context in which Levinas wrote his work is important. Although 
the Holocaust never became the explicit content of Levinasian ethics, 
it dictated much of its substance. Levinas’s philosophy was written in 
the wake of the question whether one can still philosophize within the 
memory of Auschwitz. Levinas, whose life was endangered during the 
Holocaust, revealed the weak foundations of Western thought whose 
inability to conceive difference legitimated the Nazis’ radical antisemi-
tism. The “ethical response” was the only adequate response to unprec-
edented horror, whereby “I” recognizes his/her “supreme obligation,” 
his/her “responsibility for the useless and unjustifiable suffering of 
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174
others,” as well as his/her “responsibility to respond to the evil inflicted 
upon … fellow human beings” (Bernstein 266–267).
Richard J. Bernstein put forward the idea that “Levinas’s entire 
philosophic project can best be understood as an ethical response to 
evil—and to the problem of evil which we must confront after the 
‘end of theodicy’” (Bernstein 253). He divided Levinas’s work into 
“three moments of the phenomenology of evil: evil as excess; evil as 
intention; and the hatred or horror of evil” (260). The first category 
refers to the evil that cannot be adequately comprehended, synthe-
tized, or integrated into a framework of reason, because it is “a malig-
nant sublime” (260) and such reflections prompt “an ethical response 
to evil” (262), the epitome of which was Auschwitz, “the paradigm of 
that transcendent evil that ruptures all categories of knowledge and 
understanding, evil as non-integrable excess” (266). Nie’s ethical criti-
cism excludes evil as excess. His examples do not include any example 
of Holocaust texts.
The definition of “absolute evil” radicalizes the sort of traditional 
moral dichotomy envisaged by ethical literary criticism. We cannot talk 
about a traditional ethics of good and bad in the case of the Holocaust 
because this was a “caesura” which, “within history, interrupts history 
and opens up another possibility of history, or else closes off all pos-
sibility of history” (Lacoue-Labarthe 45). As I showed elsewhere, “this 
figure of historical disjunction highlighted not only that a certain con-
tinuous conception of (Western) history was brutally interrupted but 
also that confidence in the ability of speech to represent a commonality 
of experience was shattered” (Ionescu, “‘Differend’” 255).
Limits of the East project of ethical criticism
On these thoughts, my article moves towards its final section, which 
focuses on a strand of literary production that shows the limits of 
Nie’s project: Holocaust literature, more precisely the Holocaust 
novel that “bursts the already fuzzy generic boundaries of autobiog-
raphy and fiction, memoir and fantasy, historical document and real-
ist novel. The incredible invites the surreal, and the absurdity of mass 
death defies narrative conventions of life stories, the Bildungsroman, 
or the epistolary form” (Sicher xii). It is a taxonomic category used to 
gather texts written by survivors (Aharon Appelfeld’s The Man Who 
Never Stopped Sleeping, Katerina, Badenheim 1939, For Every Sin, All 
Whom I Have Loved, and The Story of a Life; Primo Levi’s If This Is 
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a Man, published as Survival in Auschwitz in the United States, and 
The Drowned and the Saved; Elie Wiesel’s Night; Charlotte Delbo’s 
Auschwitz and After; Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower; Tadeusz 
Borowski’s This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen), the Jewish 
American post-Holocaust novel (Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick), his-
torical Holocaust novels (Thomas Keneally, William Styron, D. M. 
Thomas), second-generation Holocaust fiction (David Grossman, 
Art Spiegelman), as well as postmodernist Holocaust fiction (Martin 
Amis, Don DeLillo).
In post-WW2 Western thought, morality, ethics and forgiveness 
changed meanings completely. When one attempts to use Eastern 
ethical criticism to investigate Holocaust novels, the most problem-
atic concept of Nie’s theory is that of “ethical choice,” since all these 
works prove that the very notion of choice disappeared. For instance, 
in The Drowned and the Saved, Levi “testified to the victim’s experi-
ence in relation to ethics, the limits of language and representation” 
(Ionescu, Memorial Ethics 20). Dealing with the interpretation of survi-
vor memoirs from the famous Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust 
Testimonies at Yale, containing fourteen hundred videotaped interviews 
of Holocaust survivors, Lawrence Langer’s book Versions of Survival 
called for a post-Holocaust revision of ethics, arguing vehemently that 
traditional ethics is incapable of judging Holocaust victims’ dilemmas 
and contradictions in the death camps.
Langer started with examples from literature, for instance, Hamlet 
and Oedipus Rex (which Nie also used in his demonstrations), yet 
showed the regression from Shakespeare’s and Sophocles’s ethical 
choice to lack of choice in survivors’ stories:
Both dramatic tragedy and religious martyrdom are based on the premise that 
the individual is free to risk certain choices with full knowledge—that the 
consequences may lead to extreme suffering or death. These choices, whether 
Hamlet’s decision to duel with Laertes, Oedipus’s to pursue the truth of his 
identity despite Jocasta’s pleas, or Sir Thomas More’s to adhere to his Chris-
tian principles, are necessary to the individual’s vision of himself as a human 
being. In the deathcamps, such motives for choice survived for a time, but the 
consequences were quickly removed from the control of the individual, and 
made so unpredictable that it was virtually impossible to associate one’s vision 
of oneself as a human being with the various modes of punishment and exter-
mination in the surrounding environment. (Langer, Versions 21)
In his essay “The Dilemma of Choice in the Deathcamps,” Langer 
coined the term “choiceless choices” which are situations “where critical 
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176
decisions did not reflect options between life and death, but between 
one form of ‘abnormal’ response and another, both imposed by a situ-
ation that in no way was of the victim’s own choosing” (120). I will 
illustrate how we bring Langer’s point to bear on Nie’s conception of 
ethics, by looking not at an example of life writing (which is not fic-
tionalized), but at a fictional work that belongs to literature, William 
Styron’s emblematic novel Sophie’s Choice.
In his novel, Styron brought Auschwitz to a universal status. 
Sophie’s Choice focuses on a Polish Catholic victim of Auschwitz who 
faces the dilemma of choice (see Mathé; Rosenfeld). In this context, 
Styron’s controversial choice of proposing a more general view of the 
barbarism of Auschwitz (and the fact that Slavic Christians were also 
caught up in its program of forced labor and extermination obviates 
the need for Christian guilt and sets aside historical arguments for 
Christian antisemitism as a causative agent in the Holocaust) is yet 
another problem of ethics that this article does not deal with. Sophie’s 
worst, darkest secret is not revealed until the end of the novel, because 
even in the dreadful Auschwitz world that she describes, the reader 
needs to be prepared in several stages before reading about the most 
atrocious event of her life. Sophie’s fragmented and repeated rewrit-
ings of her history attest to her attempt to avoid poignant choices in 
her life.
Adia Mendelson-Maoz reveals that, before the hardest choice of her 
life, Sophie was either submissive or neutral: she could have chosen not 
to help her father by typing and distributing his pamphlets advocat-
ing the annihilation of the Jews, but she chose to obey him; likewise, 
she could have chosen to help her sister-in-law Wanda by supporting 
her work in the resistance group, but, while admiring Wanda for her 
courage, Sophie refused “to fight for any principle or ideology, and saw 
herself as ‘on the sidelines’” (Mendelson-Maoz 376).
Perhaps Mendelson-Maoz’s term “neutral” is not appropriate for 
all Sophie’s actions. If before marriage, Sophie was paralyzed by the 
authority of her father, after she had children, she chose a certain type 
of action with a clear purpose—refusing to help Wanda was rather a 
choice not to endanger her children, considering that they were help-
less. However,
to the extent that Sophie’s familial anti-Semitism is interwoven with the deep 
secret of her personal loss, the novel puts us in a very difficult place, properly 
akin to what Levi called “the gray zone.” And in this sense secrecy and its active 
complement, lying, provide much of the impetus for the novel’s method of 
Arleen Ionescu:      A Critique of Eastern Ethical Literary Criticism
177
storytelling, which is focused intensively on gradual recovery of truths per-
taining to the most awful and historically overdetermined personal history. 
(Spargo 153)
When Sophie was suddenly plunged into the Auschwitz “selection,” 
she had to make what we would call choice in normal circumstances 
(Mendelson-Maoz 376). In this particular case her decision “lay beyond 
the control of Auschwitz’s victims, Jewish or not” (Langer, Admitting 
the Holocaust 376). This is the kind of “decision” that victims were 
forced to make by the Nazis who mocked at their hapless victims, offer-
ing them cruel, inhuman and nonsensical choices. These choices were 
“choiceless” because they designated violent impositions. On the night 
when Sophie arrived in Auschwitz, a camp doctor made her choose 
which of her two children would die immediately by gassing and which 
would continue to live, albeit in the camp. Had she not chosen, both 
children would have been sent to the gas chamber.
Styron’s controversial novel was based on the real story of Olga 
Lengyel, Five Chimneys. Lengyel who was asked by the Nazi doctor, 
conducting the “selection,” about her elder son’s age thought that say-
ing that Arvad was not more than twelve (his real age) was a choice 
to make him live. Thus, she persuaded her mother to go to the “left” 
where her two sons were sent, thinking that her mother could take care 
of them. Lengyel chose to send the three of them with other children 
and the elderly, without knowing that “‘left’ was the way to the gas 
chambers” (Roth 106).
In Styron’s novel, Sophie chose to sacrifice her seven-year-old 
daughter, Eva, in a heart-wrenching decision that has left her in 
mourning and filled with a guilt that she could never overcome. She 
chose to save Jan, the blond, blue-eyed, German-speaking son. She 
later tried to convince Rudolf Höss, the commander of Auschwitz, to 
allow Jan to leave the camp and enter the Lebensborn program. And 
yet, despite using all her charms, including her power to seduce Höss, 
she could not save her son either. According to Mendelson-Maoz, 
at this point in the novel, for Sophie, “there was no choice, because 
it was quite probable that both of her children would die regardless 
of her decision. Sophie loses both Eva and Jan at this same moment 
(she only knows that Eva is going to be killed right away and that Jan 
is going to be in the children’s camp. She never actually sees either 
of them again)” (Mendelson-Maoz 376). Although being saved from 
Auschwitz, Sophie prolonged her life only to tell her story; she fell 
prey to alcoholism and self-destruction with Nathan with whom she 
PKn, letnik 47, št. 3, Ljubljana, november 2024
178
eventually committed suicide, refusing Stingo’s decent proposal to 
marry him.
Sophie’s Choice proves the limits of ethics which are evaded not 
only by Nie’s ethical criticism but in general by any moral theory. 
Lisa Tessman coined the term “unavoidable moral failure,” a failure 
that many Holocaust victims encountered “either because they faced 
choices all of which were unthinkable or because they lost the abil-
ity or the opportunity to function as moral agents at all” (Tessman 
162). Tessman places the unavoidable moral failures under two differ-
ent conditions, one in which the character no longer acts as “a moral 
agent” and the other where “agency has been eradicated”; the first con-
dition is “one of dilemmatic morality, where moral agents choose moral 
wrongdoings (of whatever kind or magnitude), unavoidably, because 
there are no morally good (or better) options available”; the second is 
“a condition of absent morality, where choice and moral agency are not 
even operative” (162; emphasis added).
Sophie’s Choice cannot be investigated via Nie’s theory, since it is 
not about moral dilemmas. Thinking of the twentieth-century Chinese 
literary scene, there are no equivalents of Sophie’s Choice. On the 
contrary, China takes pride that approximately 20,000 Jewish refugees 
from Germany, Austria and Poland were saved in Shanghai during 
WW2 (see Eber; Kranzler; Ionescu, “Hospitality”; Ristaino). However, 
in 1937 there was the Nanking Massacre. Not one single narrative 
dealing with the Nanking traumas (see Chang; Zhu) can be analyzed 
through the lens of Nie’s ethical criticism.
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Dileme onkraj etike: kritika vzhodnega etičnega 
literarnega kritištva
Ključne besede: literatura in etika / etična literarna veda / Vzhod in Zahod / Nie, 
Zhenzhao / Derrida, Jacques / Levinas, Emmanuel / Styron, William: Sophiejina odločitev
Namen članka je primerjati vzhodno in zahodno etično literarno kritištvo ter 
odkriti morebitne omejitve kitajske različice etičnega literarnega kritištva pri 
obravnavi zahodne literarne produkcije. V prvem delu je vzpostavljen kon-
ceptualni okvir, in sicer s primerjavo med Nie Zhenzhaovim razumevanjem 
literature kot izraza etike, Derridajevim konceptom literature kot institucije, 
ki ima »pravico povedati vse«, in Levinasovim stališčem, da je etika »prva 
filozofija«, ki vključuje odgovornost do Drugega, pri čemer je treba upošte-
vati, da je bil celoten Levinasov filozofski projekt etični odgovor na vse oblike 
»absolutnega zla«, ki so se pojavile v 20. stoletju. Na podlagi te kontekstualne 
opredelitve članek v ospredje postavi odpiranje zgodovine po drugi svetovni 
vojni kot »cezure« (Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe) in pokaže, da je Niejevo teorijo 
sicer mogoče uspešno uporabiti pri preučevanju korpusa del od srednjega veka 
do realizma 19. stoletja, vendar pa se njegov koncept »etične izbire« kot ana-
litičnega oprijemališča zlomi ob odzivu literature na grozodejstva 20. stoletja. 
Zadnji del članka se osredotoča na romane o holokavstu in predstavi študijo 
primera, ki prek analize romana Williama Styrona Sophiejina odločitev razkrije 
omejitve Niejevega etičnega literarnega kritištva.
1.01 Izvirni znanstveni članek / Original scientific article
UDK 82.0:17
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3986/pkn.v47.i3.09