What Has Morality Got To Do With Novels?

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We've got some seriously interesting stuff for you today, courtesy of the wonderful Isaac Kolding.

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WHAT HAS MORALITY GOT TO DO WITH NOVELS?

One of the perennial puzzles for literary critics is the relationship between morals and literature. Can literature teach readers moral lessons, or somehow improve them morally? Should it try? And, if readers want to understand what a work of literature means, do they have to figure out what moral or political values it’s expressing—in other words, should readers always try to figure out the moral of the story?

For my money, there are two potential problems with reading literature for moral improvement. This isn’t to say we should never do it—on the contrary, I think it’s impossible to interpret literature completely amorally or apolitically—but that there are dangers inherent in reading for the moral of the story.

The first potential problem is that readers can end up failing to take the work of literature as anything other than a piece of rhetoric. Instead of judging a book on whether it is entertaining, or beautiful, or full of life, moralistic readers can subordinate all of these judgments to whether a book tells a wholesome message: aesthetic judgment is replaced by moral judgment. If you know the critic’s ideological priors, you can more or less figure out what they will say about whatever text they read: that the novel, insofar as the critic agrees with its moral message, is good, and insofar as the critic disagrees with its moral message, is bad. This would lead readers to reject and denigrate those books that most provoke and challenge them—which is a loss, if you, like me, think that provocation and challenge are one of the good things that literature can bring us.

The second potential problem is that, especially when reading stories that are morally ambiguous, the moral message we take away from a work of literature is often a validation of our own obsessions, concerns, and beliefs. If you come to a book with strong moral convictions, you may well find the book reflecting your own moral convictions back to you. But does this mean that those moral messages are inside the work? Or does it just mean that you’re imposing your moral views onto the work of literature? It can be hard to tell, so reading literature through a moral lens seems vulnerable to a kind of wishful interpretation. For example, imagine that a critic loves a novel that seems to suggest immoral ideas. The critic, to justify their love of the novel, might come up with some labyrinthine, post-hoc interpretation of the novel that shoehorns it into the critic’s own moral or political worldview. I think this is a danger for two reasons: first, because it can be a kind of solipsism that fails to let the work of literature be itself rather than what the critic wishes it to be, and second, because the things about a work of literature that might provoke and challenge are ironed out through interpretation, rendering the work of literature into something that is fundamentally safe because it perpetually supports the critic’s own convictions. Rather than letting the work of literature be truly alien and provocative, and valued for that alienness and provocativeness, the moral view can lead readers to stretch or cut works of literature on the Procrustean bed of their worldview.

It is common, these days, to associate these problems with woke academia and left-wing publications. But, as Joshua Hren’s new book More Than a Matter of Taste: The Moral Imagination & The Spirit of Literature shows, this flawed brand of reading is by no means limited to the woke. It is quite possible from the perspective of a “common-good,” post-liberal Catholic conservative intent on revealing what Hren calls the “labyrinthine lies of liberalism.”

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Hren reads a succession of novels by a succession of non-Catholic writers—Austen, Flaubert, Turgenev, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Dostoevsky, Proust, and Joyce—showing that all of them, in one way or another, teach the validity of Hren’s religious and moral beliefs—or fail aesthetically (as in the case of Middlemarch) because they fail to do so. Hren would likely balk a bit at this description of his work; he would likely see what he is doing as more subtle and intellectual than that, because he spends a good deal of time criticizing those who would read literature as nothing more than an obvious demonstration of their own moral or political beliefs. So why do I think that this is what he’s up to?

Hren’s book begins with an account of morals in literature that rang familiar to me because of my reading of the American literary realists. Back in the late nineteenth century, the realists tried to create a new kind of novel that was self-consciously different from the popular novels of the nineteenth century. These early nineteenth-century novels were baldly moralistic: the narrator of the novel would literally interrupt the narrative to persuade their reader of some moral or political point; in the plot, vice was always punished and virtue was always rewarded; and many characters were idealized—the good were utterly pure and the evil were utterly wretched. In order to get readers to really feel the moral truths being illustrated, authors would try to crank up the emotion in their books, sometimes manipulating readers to make them weep for the beleaguered, perfect victims portrayed. Hence, these books were often called “sentimental.”

The problem with sentimental novels, the nineteenth-century realists argued, is that they don’t show what life is really like. In real life, people are a mixture of good and bad, and these morally complicated beings sometimes encounter morally ambiguous situations. And sometimes, bad people win. In light of these facts, the realists started to feel that moralistic novels were contrived, silly, and emotional and that they presented a vision of the world that was fundamentally dishonest and manipulative. Throughout the nineteenth century, the realists began to turn away from “didactic” novelists—who tended to be extremely popular and women—and to experiment with novels that tried to show the world as it really was. In doing so, the realists transformed the novel into something that, they argued, could be considered great art rather than mass-market trash.

At the same time, however, the realists were not yet ready to completely give up on the idea that literature could morally improve readers. They just thought writers needed to be more subtle about it. Here is the critic William Dean Howells, from his 1891 collection of essays, Criticism and Fiction, discussing the work of the Spanish novelist Juan Valera y Alcalá-Galiano: “I heartily agree with him that it is ‘in very bad taste, always impertinent and often pedantic, to attempt to prove theses by writing stories,’” but “morality penetrates all things, it is the soul of all things…In spite of himself, without trying, and therefore without impertinence and without pedantry, Señor Valera has proved a thesis in his story.” In other words, a novel should not try too hard to prove a thesis—that is, to teach its reader the moral of the story. If they do, they’ll come across like “impertinent,” smug after-school specials, sentimental, and womanly (according to Howells and critics of his ilk). Because “morality penetrates all things,” accurate representations of the world will ultimately serve to make readers more morally sophisticated people. The job of the artist is to be honest, not to preach.

But what does it mean to be honest and to show “reality” through art? Nobody can agree on what “reality” is! Most of the American realists seemed to see “reality” as “the fact that moral perfection and political utopia are extremely difficult, and the fact that it is impossible to truly know someone.” So, for them, “realistic” fiction was the sort of fiction that showed morally flawed and divided characters who tried and failed to communicate, sympathize with one another, and improve the world. But this is not everyone’s idea of what “reality” is. For example, a true religious believer who genuinely believes that they have access to the capital-T Truth about God and the universe would see the work of an atheist literary realist as inherently flawed. In those moments where the novels’ portrayal of “reality” makes a point which matches the believer’s convictions, it will be “realistic”; in those moments where the novel attempts to portray a Godless world as “real,” the novel will become “unrealistic,” poorly noticed, dishonest, and so on. “The book achieves realism when the author acknowledges how hollow life feels without God, but becomes unrealistic when it suggests that there is no God.” If we accept the realist rubric, differences in belief between a reader and a writer will always be described as the writer’s failure to represent reality or to tell the truth. In this way, the realist rubric is still vulnerable to the first charge against moralistic reading: that it can lead readers to judge works of art primarily on whether they are morally good or morally bad. Ideologically committed readers will simply do this in a more complex way.

This, I submit, is essentially what Hren is up to in More Than a Matter of Taste. “Literature at its best cultivates the kind of contemplation by which the soul might purge illusions and recognize reality for what it really is,” he writes, with apparent confidence in his grasp of what really is. At the same time, however, Hren criticizes readers on both the political left and right for “instrumentalizing art into a tool for instruction.” By identifying his religious and moral beliefs with “reality,” rather than understanding his views as one perspective on reality among others, Hren can have his cake and eat it too: he can evaluate literature on a moral basis without opening himself up to the criticism that he is evaluating literature on a moral basis. Instead of attempting to teach moral truths to their readers, he suggests, novels should honestly and unflinchingly depict the world, even the parts of it that are difficult to accept and deal with. Grappling with these things, Hren writes, will help readers develop the cardinal virtue of prudence by allowing them to practice their ability to make practical moral judgments in realistic, morally muddled scenarios.

But muddles can be destabilizing. They can induce doubt; they can make you struggle to maintain your beliefs. To avoid being simply morally muddled when we encounter morally muddled scenarios in novels, Hren writes, “we need to first find our footing on a truthful account of moral foundations and then enter the house of fiction, where we can find complex connections between fundamental principles and the messiness of everyday life.” But these moral foundations seem identical with Hren’s particular views, meaning that the job of the literary critic, morally speaking, is to establish connections between “the messiness of everyday life”—which is to say the tensions and muddled moral scenarios found in great fiction—and “a truthful account of moral foundations”—which is to say, Catholic moral foundations. Because, for Hren, the validity of his moral and political view is simply real, and because good literature by definition offers an encounter with reality, good literature can never fundamentally challenge his own moral foundations. All of literature therefore becomes either an elaborate, ironic, symbolic staging ground for the illustration of Hren’s beliefs or de facto untrue and therefore bad (or, as in the examples above, a mixture of the two).

In other words, aesthetic value here is essentially conflated with moral value—precisely the problem that has dogged moral readers of literary for so long, and precisely what so many people have derided “woke” left-wing critics for in past decades; but it is couched in a realist rhetoric designed to circumvent critiques of moralistic reading. The job of the critic is to decode literature to reveal a truth that the critic has known all along.

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Like any good realist, Hren rejects the sentimental literary aesthetic; but he goes considerably farther by rejecting moral theories of sentiment as well. The clearest expression of this is a gigantic essay late in the book on Dostoevsky, especially Demons, which Hren argues shows the rotten heart of sentimental theories of moral value.

Hren does not give background on this debate, which I think would be useful, so I’m going to go on a bit of an extended riff here discussing sentimentalism before I come back to Hren’s argument about Dostoevsky in the next section. The story I know about sentimental moral philosophy begins with the Scottish philosopher David Hume. For Hume, our emotional reactions to the world teach us what’s wrong and what’s right. If you witness someone harming an innocent child, you might feel outraged, for example, and this emotional experience can lead you to the knowledge that harming innocent children is immoral. Although we might develop post-hoc reasoning to support this moral knowledge, and we might subject our emotional responses to rational critique, at the heart of moral knowledge is moral intuitions, which spring from our emotions rather than our intellect.

The sentimentalist moral view implies a relationship between literature and morals. When you read, in this model, you bear witness to stories and characters that can make you respond emotionally. These emotional experiences of reading can lead you to moral knowledge—when you feel outraged at Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s depiction of American slavery, for example, you will be led to the knowledge that slavery is wrong, in part because you witness the suffering of characters and feel their pain. Today, we mostly call this way of learning moral truths “empathy,” and the idea is that literature’s moral capacity lies in its ability to make readers, as Stowe famously put it, “feel right.” This Scottish, sentimentalist moral sensibility, as Gregg Camfield has argued, informed both British and American sentimental novels, particularly Stowe’s, in the nineteenth century. This is one reason why those early novelists strained so hard to make their readers weep: because they saw weeping as a path to moral enlightenment.

One issue with the sentimentalist moral view is that different people have different moral responses when they witness the same thing. Sentimentalists like Stowe ultimately had faith that, deep down, everyone had the same basic moral sentiments, and therefore that witnessing scenes of suffering through literature would awaken the identical, universal moral sentiments in all readers. But this isn’t true. Suppose, for example, that someone writes a story about a woman who has an abortion because her life will be in danger if she carries the fetus to term. The sympathies of pro-choice observers might be drawn primarily to the mother, whereas the sympathies of anti-abortion observers might be drawn primarily to the unborn child. In this case, it’s impossible to really say which of these sympathetic responses are “correct” without recourse to some moral principle or belief beyond readers’ emotional response to the story. A purely sentimental outlook, in short, doesn’t provide a way to resolve differences in moral sentiments.

But do we need to resolve differences in moral sentiments? Isn’t it OK that some people feel one way and some people feel another? This is, more or less, the liberal ethos. Liberalism says: “Different strokes for different folks. As long as they aren’t harming someone else or curtailing another person’s rights, each individual can act according to their own moral sentiments, even if that means that they do things that other people consider deeply immoral.” But this doesn’t really solve the issue, because this means that there needs to be some sort of agreement on the definition of some very loaded terms: “harm,” “rights,” and “person.” (Liberalism also focuses pretty relentlessly on the “individual,” which is not a morally or politically neutral focus.) Rather than providing a neutral space for everyone to act according to their own moral sentiments, liberalism itself relies on a set of foundational moral beliefs about rights, harms, and persons. This is one reason why the abortion debate is so irresolvable and combustible—because each side of the debate has conflicting sentiments about what constitutes “harm,” “rights,” and “person.” If you really believe that fetuses are persons, you likely believe that abortion is a form of homicide that violates not just the right to life of the unborn but the great and valuable principle that human life is sacred. If you are pro-choice, you likely believe that prohibiting abortion harms women, violates a right to bodily autonomy, and dehumanizes or depersonalizes women by revoking their capacity to control what happens to their bodies. At issue in conflicts over abortion are foundational moral beliefs, not moral beliefs that can be written off as “different strokes for different folks.”

From the point of view of a pro-life person who is utterly persuaded of their position, then, a liberal society that allows abortion misuses sentimentalism. From this perspective (with which, I should clarify, I disagree), sentiments of pity and compassion for a suffering or wronged woman is used as justification for, essentially, murder; even worse, any enormity might be justified if one defines “harm,” “rights,” and “person” in the right way. A similar critique of liberalism has been made from the left, too. For example, plenty of scholars of American literature have argued that American liberals have historically excluded certain human beings, particularly enslaved black people and Native Americans, from personhood and therefore from considerations of “rights” and “harm,” thereby making the most extreme circumscription of human freedom concordant, in a facile way, with liberalism and its purported liberties.

Indeed, the question of harm in particular seems to give Hren grief, because it can lead those with a humanitarian impulse to attempt to minimize harm, even if that means disregarding those things that Hren sees as sacred (for example, allowing suffering and terminally ill people to end their own lives, which reduces suffering but seems to ignore the sacredness of human life). This sentimental rejection of suffering as such also might subvert God’s plan—Hren decries the “sentimental pity for the ‘wretched of the earth,’ a pang for any pain, deserved or not—as if no earthly punishment might be part of God’s providence.” And it can also lead us to fail to be judgmental enough: “Another obvious yield of corrupted compassion is the legalization of innate evils in an effort to remove all ‘stigma’—even just shame—from the face of the earth.” Hren does not specify what “innate evils” he is describing; my hunch is that he is here referring to same-sex marriage. If I, a supporter of same-sex marriage, recoil from this, it is likely because I am, as I may as well admit now, a sentimental liberal at heart.

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This discussion of sentiment, liberalism, and suffering brings us, finally, to an actual literary reading. Lacking the time to discuss every reading in this long book, I wanted to focus on Hren’s lengthy and discursive readings of Dostoevsky, particularly Demons, because the 70-page chapter on Dostoevsky is the longest and most deeply felt part of the book.

At the heart of Dostoevsky’s novels, Hren argues, is a devastating critique of humanitarianism, which aims to reduce suffering and is motivated by sentimental compassion. This, according to Hren, makes humanitarianism “first and foremost a protest against the divine and natural laws.” Hren argues that humanitarian sentimentalism is essentially a product of ressentiment, and that, “more than any other emotion, the ressentiment phenomenon is connected to hatred, revenge, malice, envy, spite, and the impulse to detract.” He approvingly quotes Flannery O’Connor: “In the absence of faith now, we govern by tenderness…when tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness [Christ], its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced labor camps and the fumes of the gas chamber.”

The most dreadful form of humanitarianism, for Hren, is “Gnosticism.” Gnostics, he writes, believe that God is “author of and allied with the forces of darkness,” which is why, for the Gnostic, there is so much suffering in the world. Gnostics want to purify the world of suffering, perfecting it through a utopian politics that relies on secret and esoteric knowledge. This means that they transfer the devotion, mystery and “fervent ultimacy” that ought to be reserved for God to their political projects. They try, in short, to make Heaven on Earth by eradicating suffering. Since their goal is so ostensibly noble, they can justify any enormity if that enormity can be said to be in pursuit of utopia.

It is this particular form of Gnosticism, Hren says, that Dostoevsky is satirizing in Demons, particularly in his portrayal of the revolutionary characters. Hren’s reading partially makes sense and is partially a superimposition of Hren’s own beliefs and interests onto a text that does not quite match them. (This review is already long, so I won’t dwell on every essay in it, but I think this is a pattern in the book, and seems particularly clear in the chapter on James Joyce.) The Devils (as the novel is called in the translation I read) does not focus primarily on compassion as a source of villainy, for one thing, and the novel’s two central characters, Nicholas Stavrogin and Peter Verkhoevensky, seem bent on inflicting suffering for its own sake rather than purging the world of it.

The novel follows a small group of rogues and revolutionaries who want to bring down Russian society for a variety of reasons. Kirilov, a troubled engineer, has come to the bizarre conclusion that killing himself is the ultimate act of freedom, and that following through on this act will somehow free other people of their fear of death, which will make them godlike masters of themselves who are capable of choosing whether to live or die. So, in a weird way, Kirilov sees his own suicide as a move toward utopia. This does seem to be an example of Gnosticism as Hren defines it, although with a significant exception: freedom, not the cessation of suffering, is Kirilov’s highest ideal. I also agree that Shigalyov, an eccentric who writes a vast ten-volume plan for a future “earthly paradise,” is a kind of Gnostic, although again, his utopian system “[starts] from unlimited freedom,” even if it ends in “unlimited despotism.” As in the case of Kirilov, it seems to me that Dostoevsky is here satirizing the results of an arrogant intellect (Shigalyov insists that “everything I say in my book is irrefutable”) that is excessively devoted to freedom rather than to the cessation of suffering. Nowhere do Shigalyov or Kirilov express sentimental compassion for those who suffer. Nor, even, is Stepan Verkhoevensky, the elder liberal whose intellectual laxity and permissiveness allow for the rise of these revolutionaries, guided by compassion. Like Kirillov and Shigalyov, he is much more clearly motivated by a self-serving, egotistical intellectualism. The connection between these conspirators’ Gnosticism and their humanitarianism, in other words, is brought to the text by Hren rather than discovered there.

In fact, the novel’s primary characters exhibit quite the opposite of compassion: they are sadists. Neither Peter Verkhoevensky and Nicholas Stavrogin are brought to despair because of the suffering they observe in the world. Verkhoevensky and Stavrogin seem motivated primarily by a quest for diversion and stimulation—their motivation a misguided vitalism rather than a misguided sense of compassion. “I’m a rogue, not a Socialist,” Peter says, before detailing a plan to destroy Russian society and only to consider how to rebuild society after it has “crashed to the ground.” (What kind of a utopian is this? What kind of sentimentalist?) Although Peter does suggest that “socialism among us spreads chiefly because of sentimentality,” in context, he’s cynically discussing how to use sentimentality to manipulate others. He, himself, isn’t motivated by it. He’s an agent of destruction, a relisher of violence, more interested in transforming Earth into a Hell than a Heaven.

Stavrogin in particular is driven by a desire to escape his own boredom. In his confession of his misdeeds to the Bishop Tikhon, Stavrogin clearly lays out that his hideous crimes result from his desire to have fun, or, even better, to really feel something: “The main thing was that I was bored with life, sick and tired to death of it,” a sentiment that the novel’s narrator verifies earlier on. Stavrogin had a “craving for those direct and unmixed sensations which were so sought after by some restlessly active gentlemen of the good old days.” He enjoys feeling “the feeling of rapture caused by the agonizing consciousness of [his] baseness.” His confession is full of references to “sensation,” “pleasure,” ecstasy,” and so on. These sensations do not have to be pleasant: he relishes being able to feel fear. He enjoys his villainy, once again, because in choosing to be so base, he reveals his own freedom: “I neither know nor feel good or evil…there is neither good nor evil…it is just a prejudice…I can be free from any prejudice, but…once I attain that degree of freedom I am done for.” Once again, it is an arrogant and destructive pursuit of freedom—not utopia—that drives Stavrogin to disgusting depths. It is certainly not political power that Stavrogin wants, for he declines Peter’s offer to make him the figurehead of post-revolutionary Russia. Stavrogin is no politician; nor is he a humanitarian.

This may seem like hair-splitting, but it’s important, because the entire point that Hren wants to make here is that Dostoevsky demonstrates the ultimate villainy of contemporary godless, sentimental liberal humanitarians, who are, Hren suggests, utopian and therefore, in spiritual terms, Gnostic. If this thesis is true, Hren needs to be able to make the case that Dostoevsky’s revolutionaries share important characteristics with contemporary humanitarians. But if not all of Dostoevsky’s revolutionary characters can really be categorized as Gnostics, and if all of them seem callously indifferent to human suffering, in some cases actually seeking to cause as much of it as possible in pursuit of freedom, how can they be identified with humanitarianism, which Hren identifies as misplaced compassion and a misguided attempt to end suffering?

What we have, then, in this case, is a long, long editorial by Hren denouncing the “globalized ideology of global citizenship.” But instead of using evidence derived from real life, Hren selectively reads Dostoevsky to support his claims. It’s unpersuasive as a way of reading literature, but it’s also an unpersuasive way to critique liberal humanitarianism. Why is the plot of a nineteenth-century Russian novel evidence that contemporary secular humanitarianism is bankrupt? Even if we accepted that Dostoevsky perfectly illustrated the kind of Gnostic humanitarianism that Hren decries, why is the fact that Dostoevsky agrees with Hren evidence that Hren is right, or even that “Gnostic humanitarianism” names something both real and important about the contemporary U.S. rather than nineteenth-century Russia?

I am not a moral authority, a philosopher, or a political writer. I read books. This is the only realm in which I have any crumb of expertise. So I’m not going to comment on the truth or falsity of Hren’s moral, religious, or political views. I disagree with them, quite strongly, and I’ll leave it at that—for I don’t know what else to do. Hren’s moral claims all rest upon the foundation of a spiritual belief that I simply do not possess; Hren’s belief and my unbelief opens a chasm between us across which persuasion does not seem possible. Hren is, he believes, in possession of divine truth; I cannot see that either one of us are. (Nor does it seem obvious to me that Dostoevsky is.)

All I can say is that, when I encounter a work of literature, I do my best to understand it on its own terms—to inhabit the world of another person, even and especially when they are very alien to me and my own beliefs. This is never something I am able to do perfectly. But in return for my efforts, I am afforded a way to see myself and my beliefs as peculiar and partial rather than The Truth, and thereby to challenge and broaden them. Fiction allows me the opportunity to open up my own windows and let the wind of a much larger world into the house of my mind, even if this ruffles the papers on my desk, so to speak. It allows me to understand who I am, how I relate to others, and whether my beliefs seem mistaken—to enter into a process of questioning and self-critique and deliberation. The world I glimpse in this way is often frightening—it is messy and pluralistic and packed with irresolvable tensions that I am helpless to resolve, some of which I’ve described in this essay. In this uncertain way of looking at the world, I see not a single truth that is either acceded to or deviated from, but a plurality of perspectives, all of which have something of value but none of which can give me the final word. This perspective is allergic to neat conclusions and, in most cases, to moral clarity; there is little, if any, divine truth to be found in this process. It is human, human, human.

Isaac Kolding is a writer, teacher, and PhD candidate living in Buffalo, NY. He writes the newsletter Amateur Criticism, and his writing has appeared in American Literature, American Literary Realism, J19, and elsewhere.