on moral imagination
Symposium on the Novel: Part II
Moral panics over art are a feature of every age. The novel has attracted a number of them.
In fact, moral panics over the novel were there right from the start. Don Quixote (1605 & 1615), frequently labeled the first modern novel, is a quasi-chivalric romance that begins with our hero reading so many chivalric romances that he loses his grip on the difference between fact and fiction, just as clerical critics of the genre had warned. One of the funniest and most chilling scenes in the book is the debate between the Priest and the Barber over which of Quixote’s books to burn in a ‘witty and grand inquisition’ (donoso y grande escrutinio). (Among the titles discussed is Cervantes’s earlier pastoral novel Galatea (1585), which they decide to postpone judgment about until they can evaluate its promised second part.) The books are discussed in this scene as if they were themselves heretics, their authors saved or condemned by proxy.
Quixote itself is only quasi-chivalric because the book, like its hero, digests a variety of novelistic sub-genres, including the pastoral and the picaresque, whose lowborn characters pose an even greater danger to traditional values than stories about knights-errant do. Cervantes thereby one-ups pious critics who were part of the Catholic Reformation (such as Antonio Possevino, who blamed the popularity of the chivalric Amadís cycle for the spread of the Lutheran heresy in France) by extending the scope of their moral panic to novels, and, indeed, imaginative writing, of all kinds.[1]
This reputation for leading readers astray followed the novel in its further incarnations. Consider Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), among the first novels written in English. Despite Richardson’s overbearing didacticism, the book’s sympathetic portrayal of a young and vulnerable woman was enough to invite the concern that readers, particularly women readers, would be corrupted by it, finding attractive the very situations that are presented as dangerous to Pamela’s virtue (that is, primarily, her chastity). It would be better, the thought went, for women to get their morals from the church or from more straightforward handbooks than even the primmest novel, a case that was pressed against the many novels and romances that followed Pamela’s publication.
These episodes may seem quaint today, when even the Roman Catholic church has given up on its Index of Prohibited Books and imaginative literature is typically judged either harmless or in some vague way improving. But if the novel is a serious art form, we should expect that its effect on readers might be transformative. I will argue that we should take this possibility seriously – and hence at least entertain the idea of morally corrupting imaginative literature.
One possible rebuttal: since novels present us with unreal possibilities, they can’t touch either our views about the world as it is or our habits of dealing with others in the real world; hence, we can’t be morally worse off for having read them, whether carefully or carelessly. Even after we learn that Sherlock Holmes lives at 221b Baker Street, after all, we would hardly think to look for his apartment among the Georgian terraces of Marylebone. If moral life is about dealing with and responding appropriately to reality, fiction must, according to this view, be morally neutral.
But the experience that is lampooned in Don Quixote – losing one’s grip on the difference between fiction and reality – is in fact an essential part of reading imaginative literature. To be absorbed in a literary world is to treat it as if it mattered. We can certainly read novels as material for anthropological study (perhaps one can recreate a version of this experience by reading books written for very young children), but in doing so, we would fail to read them as novels.
What is it to treat a novel as if it mattered? We can begin to address this question by rejecting one classic answer to it: we need not sympathize with the characters the novel depicts. That is to say, although a novel typically presents us with characters whose actions and experiences we are meant to attend to carefully in some way, the point is not to adopt the perspective of some one or another of these characters or to adapt our sentiments or responses to theirs.
But we can and should criticize novels if they fail to reveal to us important human possibilities. They might do so because they are banal. They might also do so if they aim simply to make us world-weary, as a certain strand of anti-humanist modern literature does — that is, if they aim to strengthen in us a sense that experiences matter only to those undergoing them, that aspiration is just so much folly. The best representative I know of this anti-humanism is Michel Houellebecq, the French novelist, whose oeuvre seems devoted to puncturing our pretensions to decency. Moral failure is not only inevitable in Houellebecq’s world — it is the thinking man’s prerogative.
I’ve spoken elsewhere about how this view of things is worked out in Houellebecq’s Submission, a book sometimes held up, because of its political concerns — above all, the question of religious toleration and the correlative problem of decadence in secular Europe — as his most serious work. (I thought about titling that talk, only half-jokingly, “Bring Back the Index!”)
I may seem to be objecting, rather censoriously, to Houellebecq’s mordant satire. But it is his work’s implicit claim to sincerity that troubles me more. In Submission, the novel’s satirical gaze is directed principally at the sclerotic institutions of French society, which, one by one, are overrun by the deadly seriousness of Islam – precisely why so many reviewers were captivated by it. But all religions in the world of Submission operate simply as different systems of regulating desire, and, underneath the veneer of political critique, the limitlessness of human desire, especially bodily desire, turns out to be the novel’s only truth. While the book also subjects its narrator François (who, in Houellebecq’s usual fashion, is an alter ego of his) to its satirical gaze, this truth about desire is held up to readers as what is left when we strip away all the falsity of aspiration.
I’ve come, however, to think that the very form of the novel provides a site of resistance to any such pure cynicism such as Houellebecq’s: to take human beings seriously enough to describe them in the ways that the novel demands is an act of love. Indeed, both the artful writing and the discerning reading of novels — and imaginative literature more broadly — calls for a love of humanity, an attentiveness to the way that even our failures might be noble, even our evildoing the pursuit of some genuine good.
The best novels, then, need not be didactic in their substance, as the pious critics once demanded. Rather, they must orient us to some reality in human life that we have not fully appreciated, offering us the chance to transform our moral imagination, to expand our capacity to represent human possibilities and to take them seriously. The worst novels foster our contempt or even our self-hatred, telling us implicitly that human lives are not worth taking seriously.
In reality, this moral nihilism is just another form of banality, albeit one that has firmly secured its aesthetic credentials in our time. It is the enemy of true art, which need not seek to make us good or tell us what is true, but must presuppose that truth and goodness are worth pursuing.
[1] I rely here on Marc Fumaroli, “Jacques Amyot and the Clerical Polemic Against the Chivalric Novel”, Renaissance Quarterly 38.1 (1985): pp. 22–40.
Great thoughts here and thank you for sharing.