Ethics of Sensibility in Tom Wolfe's Back to Blood

In his controversial essay, "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel" (November 1989), Tom Wolfe seems baffled as to why contemporary writers have failed to see the realities of American life and instead have embraced some imported literature celebrating nihilism, absurdity, play of language, and self-reflexivity on the grounds that American life no longer deserves the word "real" since it is chaotic, fragmented, random, discontinuous, and absurd (54). He censures his contemporary postmodern writers for their rejection of the realistic narrative, their refusal to present social, cultural, and political issues of the time, as well as their tendency towards irony and cynicism. Wolfe is not alone in this critique of postmodernist excesses. A new era in the fields of music, aesthetics, film criticism, poetry, literature, and philosophy started to emerge in the mid-1980s and especially the 90s. The new movement has been referred to as neo-realism (Rebein), aesthetics of authenticity (Funk, Grob, and Huber), new sincerity (Kelly), reconstruction (Huber), or post-postmodernism (McLaughlin). The writers associated with this trend mainly react to the postmodernist "supposed nihilism, solipsism and deconstruction of values, subjects and agency" (Huber 48) and ask the question of how to write with genuine sentiment and without irony or cynicism about love, family, spirituality, war, sex, and fear (Winkler). This new sincerity movement has revived interest in sensibility, which had lost its grandeur since the mid-nineteenth century. Sentimentality, by this time, was excluded from ethics on the grounds that sentimentalism encloses one in oneself and in enjoyment; sentimentalism is "mawkish self-indulgent and actively pernicious modes of feeling" (Bell 2). On the contrary, Andrew Gibson claims that sensibility "properly designates an ethical faculty" and is different from cognition since it does not approach an object with the intention of conquering it, but is rather characterized by "a mode of openness and attentiveness" (162). He also notes that, in the twentieth century, sensibility has been revived by Emmanuel Levinas's ethics of alterity. Interestingly, Levinas in his early philosophical and ethical works, as Gibson states, is unsympathetic towards sensibility and regards it like other anti-sentimentalists as "naive," "narrow," "egoist," "ungenerous," something which does not "make its way outward" (165). Later his attitude towards sensibility undergoes a radical shift, however, and it changes from "self closure" to being open to the infinite, to being "a pre-originary susceptibility," a "pre-original involvement," and a constant "subjection to the other" (Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers 134, 147, 165). Sensibility is "the exposedness to affection," "vulnerabiliby," "susceptibility," giving without holding back, and the opposite of the subjectivity of the ego (Levinas, Otherwise than Being 62, 146). In this way, sensibility becomes the center of Levinas's ethics of alterity that revises the traditional way of regarding the Other. In an interesting comparison, Gibson has related Levinas's concept of sensibility to George Bataille's notion of "unrestricted or general economy" as opposed to "restricted economy." Accordingly, Levinasian sensibility is assumed to be a kind of "exuberance," "excess," "generosity," "expenditure without reserve," "a will to give," or "transgression," as opposed to the "practical judgment," "accumulation and production," "calculation," "reserve," "the will to withhold or retain," and "taking the side of taboo" which were enforced by the rise of bourgeois culture, modern Christianity, capital, and utility (Gibson 165-66). Although Tom Wolfe is technically remote from the contemporary writers of new realism (who have not broken their ties with the postmodern techniques) and is closer to the eighteenth-century realists, he seems to follow the same goals as the cult of "New Sincerity. …