The Past and Future of Moralizing in Literature

This repels me: writers who criticize our superficial culture but prize their own style and artistry.

Many of our most renowned authors are guilty. They present insightful and commonplace cultural criticisms with such masterful linguistic flourishes and lexical exhibitions that readers cannot help but be impressed by style—and wonder, why don’t they write more plainly, like Becket, Hemmingway or Epictetus?

What do all our morals gain from shiny veneer? Is it the sugar that coats the bitter pill of guilt? But if we judge from certain critics, the medicine is wasted and the style and artistry alone demands attention. As if the moral engine of the book did not demand a cultural revolution—at least a cold, hard look at our possible complicity in the horrors of our culture.

I have never heard of a case in which a book of fiction influenced readers to raise their moral standards for themselves as well as others. But perhaps the influence of the world’s moralizing fiction is too subtle to be noticed, even by those who experience it. Indeed, if per capita murder rates have been decreasing for centuries, why not give literary fiction some of the credit?

Imagine if Martin Luther King had spoken in monotone and without any rhetorical and poetical talent. I suppose no one would have listened, and therefore he would not have been assassinated. But why make suppositions that can never be tested?

The value of beautifying morals may never be known, but I do know that it is self-contradictory and hypocritical.

Secondly, books that take their readers into the pitiful and sordid and base and loathsome lives of the unfortunate and malicious … such books lower my energy and infect me with their negative emotions. For many readers this influence is probably all too subtle; most people only read books that agree with their emotional state or their desired emotional state.

Environmentalism as a moral issue in literature: Writing effective environmental literature may be even more challenging than writing literature that seeks to sensitize readers to the suffering of other people. Why? Because people, whatever their culture or color, may more easily facilitate identification and empathy than monkeys, panda bears, sheep, fish, insects, and trees. Trees? Yes, we have tree-huggers, but probably not because tree-huggers empathize with trees; rather, they understand that some forms of “animate” life, possibly their own too, depend on trees.

Literature that addresses the challenges facing the ecosphere, or nature itself, is too far removed from familiar particulars too be able to inspire feelings of empathy; the grand environmentalist must write as a scientist, providing reasons for environmentally responsible behaviour. In other words, as the environment becomes the predominant moral issue facing humankind, writers will cease to find much meaning by creating characters and narratives that generate emotional appeal.

(What kind of reasons for environmentally responsible behaviour can we provide? If the negative or moral emotions cannot form part of the argument, are we to persuade people with data showing the undesirability of ecological catastrophe? A question for comedians and thinkers.)

When the entire ecosphere is at stake the moral emotion of empathy is superfluous. Why? Because, with respect to the ecosphere, everyone is already in the same boat, and no imaginative leap is needed to grasp that dwindling water resources, pollution, rising ocean levels, pandemics, high tech warfare, desertification and peak oil are issues that together leave no one untouched.

In the end, environmental catastrophe is not a subject fit for literature or art, and wherever it is introduced into art it is ignored. Who pays any attention to the ravaged landscape behind Mona Lisa? And think of the environmental destruction envisioned in the Book of Revelation and all the Christians who welcome the sight of such destruction as the fulfillment of their deluded wishes; and think of Joyce’s Bloom associating a graveyard with a honeycomb… as if death was the candy of the promised land.

And yet—what if it is?

The Use of History

Ah, history, you are written by the victors, and where victory is lacking, we flatter ourselves with Hebrew Bibles, some Hollywood spin on Vietnam and so on.

By far, the central function of history is egoistic and culture preserving. Histories rarely function to raise questions and learn lessons about how to forge a social, political and culture system that values comedy over tragedy, children over pride and tradition, and art over consumerism and greed… Until such transformations are made, no culture will ever avoid violence and corruption. But most historians are too meek for such grand ideals, and being mired in the language of war, history treats peace and freedom as ultimate goals. Peace, however, is not a not a goal, it is the state that follows the successful pursuit of the three (and possibly other) goals I mentioned. And freedom is a useless word unless it is married to the idea of absolute submission to sensible rules that obviously do not yet exist.

Well, but perhaps I am wrong. Who knows? At least, let us try something different and experiment a little. For, if history has any meaning at all, it is that experiments are needed to end the cycle of violence and the spread of hunger and environmental destruction.

Perhaps I wax too serious in speaking of history. Enough history has been written, and I can say, with utmost confidence, that thanks to the historians for constantly reminding us about the horrors of history we won’t have any more of that war nonsense!

And, thanks to the historians, next time Hitler flaunts his brazen face in Germany, we’re gonna tell him to sod off!

Ah, yes, but that’s just the trouble, isn’t it? History never repeats itself exactly, and people don’t recognize the billions of Hitlers and potential Hitlers walking among them. The whole art of recognizing patterns and similarities remains undeveloped, and the understanding that small domestic injustices are worth as much attention as the same injustices committed on the political or “historical” scale—this knowledge hardly exists, and Timothy Findley’s The Wars is one of the few books I know that hints at it.

The historian must reveal the universals in the particulars of history, but even then, without a scientifically grounded vision of how to attain a better future and how we can improve ourselves, history can only teach us to avoid history.

In the end, the past must be forgotten, for whatever enemies we faced in the past, one universal, immortal enemy awaits us, an enemy who we can only conquer by befriending, and if we fail at that we will never be rid of mortal enemies and irrational fears.

In the end, the past must be forgotten, for whatever mistakes we committed in the past, tomorrow we can commit better ones, funnier ones. Or will tragedy never be turned into comedy?

Kafka

What if Kafka was right, what if Max Brod should have heeded the following deathbed request:

“Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me … in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread.”

Let us not assume, rather selfishly, that Kafka was kidding or was not himself, let us attempt to defend and therefore respect his wish.

Why burn his work unread?

First Reason: In no way was Franz’s writing intended to be public. It is a deeply personal and private writing, almost an extension of his diary and letter writing. Reading it to the public often made him laugh—not because the content was funny but because reading it to the public seemed so inappropriate.

Second Reason: His writing communicates one man’s perception of the absurdity and meaninglessness of life in Germany, possibly of life in general. Much of his work reflects his personal, professional experience of the onerous, impersonal and labyrinthine German bureaucratic and legal system. While his writing may testify to one man’s ability to keep his imagination alive, it is hardly a celebration of the imagination, nor does it provide useful insights into human behaviour, and—finally—since it is neither hope or happiness inspiring perhaps we can agree that it is not particularly recommendable to the public.

Third Reason: For Franz, writing was as much a torment as a pleasure. Bouts of creativity kept him up late at night, alienated him from his wife, weakened his already delicate constitution and was no help in his struggle with tuberculosis. Why would he wish it on others?

Fourth Reason: His major works were left unfinished on account of the demands of his professional life, domestic duties and his poor health. Possibly, he felt that even his finished works were not truly finished works, that is, perhaps he sensed that they did not fulfill his authorial potential.

In light of these reasons to respect Franz’s wish, how do we respond to Harold Bloom, who not only ignores Franz’s wish (as I have done) but heaps further disrespect on him by claiming the following, “Despite all his denials and beautiful evasions, [Kafka's writing] quite simply is Jewish writing”? Bloom’s statement is both bold and reductive. No one can deny the influence of Judaism on Franz, but to say his work is “simply” Jewish might underestimate the influence of the man’s German education and his professional work as a German bureaucrat and lawyer. The absence of metaphor, attention to mundane details and the nameless characters and placeless places in Franz’s works hardly attest to a Judaic influence; these qualities echo the impersonal world of bureaucracy. Indeed, since I have worked with government bureaucrats—the influence is simply unmistakable.

In conclusion, disregarding Franz’s wish to belong to no one seems both perverse and flattering. That said, the time may yet come when we will honour his brave self-assessment and respect his noble wish.

The Golden Fool

The neatest bit of moral insipidity ever conceived is probably the Golden Rule: “Treat others as you want them to treat you.”

First Problem: The Golden Rule is circular. It essentially means that kindness will prevail if people are kind to one another.

Second Problem: Does the Golden Rule help to improve the world by suggesting that other people have the same feelings we do? Experience has taught me that people do not have the same feelings in either intensity or origin as I do, and that the Golden Rule’s appeal to pity is quite useless with people who possess power to harm.

Third Problem: The Golden Rule assumes that all men and women know what they should do to keep their conscience clean; in other words, it assumes that everyone has a receptive, enlightened and sensitive conscience, possibly one that forbids doing anything unpleasant to anyone, criminals and naughty children included. The trouble is that plenty of ignorant people fulfill the Golden Rule while entirely mis-educating their children. In contrast, responsible teachers and parents know that some unpleasant ideas must be communicated to children and they know how to do this without doing undue harm. Unfortunately, few people understand anything about this; the problem is that despite their systemic neglect of their parental duty they fulfill the Golden Rule.

Why must unpleasant ideas be communicated to children? So that they can grow comfortable with reality, which is not entirely pleasant, although the quality of reality is also a reflection of our own education. The unpleasant aspects are like gravity, without which we would float away and with too much of it we would be crushed.

“That which is hateful to you do not do to another … the rest (of the Torah) is all commentary, now go study,” said Rabbi Hillel, for he loved to study, but many hate to study, therefore why do you require it of them, you hypocrite! —You joker!

“So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them; for this is the Law and the prophets.” (Matthew 7:12 RSV) Oh, this is too good to resist: Didn’t Jesus accept his crucifixion as a good and necessary action? If so, then he must have wished for it, and then he should do it to us. Funny, right? And yet, I’m quite serious. A good atheist poet will know how to redeem the crucifixion as a symbol of a universal necessity.

James Joyce

Why read Ulysses or Finnegan’s Wake? As a fan of both books, as someone who still finds some amusement and insights in Joyce’s works, perhaps I will seem to contradict myself by issuing a condemnation of Finnegan’s Wake. But seriously, James condemned himself by stating the following about FW:

“I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.”

At worst, these are the words of an egomaniac and a sadist bent on tormenting a class of professionals he largely dismissed; at best, these are the words of a most subtly sarcastic comedian. He wants them to “argue” – you understand, to argue and not to achieve epiphanies and moments of cerebral-aesthetical bliss! Think of the cunning and malevolence… and yet, think of the gall or absurdity of openly stating his evil design…

Ha-ha-ha.

Oh, wait, this isn’t funny at all, is it?

“The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works.”

What? You egomaniacal monster! My whole life? Well, actually I don’t mind devoting my whole life, or at least my waking hours, or at least those hours—or minutes—when I’m not otherwise employed, but I would only do so if your books gave me happiness and good precepts by which to live, and I fear you never intended to provide either, so there!

Ultimately, reading James’ works is an exorbitant exercise suited only for book workers, i.e. polyglot and lexically overdeveloped academics—and yet, not even for them!

What the world needs is sustainable literature—literature the whole world can learn to enjoy with relative ease and without a crippling investment in post-secondary education. Or what, shall happiness and wisdom belong exclusively to the wealthy? Ah, no, what they call education is an industry and largely a colossal waste of time.

Poe

While we are right to see the causes of personal tragedies in the tragic shortcomings of the greater world, we are also right see causes of personal tragedies in the tragic failure of art or any personal work to sustain and nourish us. This means, by way of example, that we might not be surprised that Edgar Allan Poe drank himself to death, for his work, regardless of its morbid influence, is hardly something that might give one the strength to enjoy living. Works such as Poe’s, which are rooted in personal tragedy and vision, might be relatively meaningless to the many fans who experience his fiction as just that–fiction, something that stimulates and elicits no understanding of any deeper truths.

The Threefold Evolution of Literature

Beyond the toilet-paper books that pursue emotional stimulation void of moral direction and knowledge void of practicality—beyond this a spectrum exists on which “literary” novels can be plotted, with the Moral-Philosophical Novel at one end, the Comical Novel at another end, and the Aesthetical Novel at the third end. But no novel I know belongs entirely to one tendency, as even the aesthetical extremism of Finnegan’s Wake contains jokes and hints of moral tales and philosophies.

The Moral-Philosophical Novel begins as a description of inter-personal actions that result in either good or evil, joy or tragedy. The Bible, if I may be excused the indiscretion of including it in a category that already contains Finnegan’s Wake, is a primary example. The novel as a medium for actions that demonstrate religious morals and teachings continued beyond the Renaissance, but by the 18^th century, the Moral-Philosophical Novel provides distinctly less explanation and more emotion. Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights’ muscular prose takes readers on a descent into a moral-philosophical Hell of inter-personal action. The book is crammed with moral insights into the causes of immoral behavior, and while none is particularly religious, and religion may even stand condemned by it, at least the Golden Rule is at work here—and even more than it is in the Bible. The Bible taught the Golden Rule, saying, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you or go to Hell, but this teaching fails to provide readers with the necessary emotional involvement and development, for it does not teach readers to feel for others, while in contrast the Romantic novel, by bringing readers into the emotional world of its characters, is designed just for this purpose.

After the Romantic era, the Moral-Philosophical Novel evolved new narrative conventions, culminating in stream of consciousness writing, but these developments did little or nothing to intensify the emotional impact of the novel, and were instead treated as experimental curiosities. The reasons for this may be that internal narratives reduce both thought and emotion to strings of words, grammatical conventions, formal organization and so on, and they alienate their characters from the world, strip them of action and fill them with pseudo-philosophical broodings and epiphanies. Thus, in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, action is largely absent, and the tale drifts in a moral-philosophical cloud that seems to paralyse action. In The Mark on the Wall, this evolution produces a fictional-philosophical reflection on the possible meanings and origins of a mark on the wall. We are not far from Beckett here.

Where does the Moral-Philosophical Novel end? Nowhere; with nothing. In one sense, the moral teaching ends with the teaching of mortality, death, for death conveys the single, most powerful emotions. How does one teach or communicate death in a novel? Why teach it at all? History is already replete with the act of death, so perhaps authors should try to avoid being redundant and present readers with blank pages? Who knows how effective that would be?

In a way, Virginia Woolf is Stephen Daedelus—at least insofar as she represent the moral-philosophical voice that failed to express itself, failed—in her case—not because the author’s conscious decision but because she never formulated practical principles for living(and dying) and remained immersed in the flow of her emotions and musings. And so, perhaps we should take it as a fair warning that her work ended by embracing, through suicide, that which marks the terminus of the Moral-Philosophical Novel: death.

James Joyce is a rare novelist who consciously turned away from the Moral-Philosophical Novel. In Portrait of an Artist, Stephen vows to become a prophet of a new moral code, but Joyce never intended to fulfill this promise in his “sequels.” In Ulysses, Stephen is lost, overshadowed by Bloom, who is paralyzed by his Judaic morals and political powerlessness. And yet Ulysses is not only a moral-philosophical book, it is—perhaps primarily—an experiment in prose that aims to stimulate thinking, moral and amoral alike. In Finnegan’s Wake the author focuses his energies still more on turning language into a thought-stimulating device and medium; actions are faint and indistinct shadows and death is synonymous with a circular river.

I have spoken elsewhere about the evolution of comedy. I will just add a note about the injustice of the comical being excluded from serious literary discussions and categories. Many great authors have turned to the comical, or fallen for it, for the pursuit of comedy as well as the pursuit of the Aesthetical mode provides authors with a necessary elixir from the Moral-Philosophical tendency to produce tragedy, painful reflections on injustice and stultifying reflections on existential absurdity. Of course, in theory the Moral-Philosophical Mode could provide a cheery and invigorating image of the world, but since that so rarely happens among intelligent and conscientious authors, those who pursue the Moral-Philosophical mode risk the danger of becoming like the tragic and paralysed characters they depict.

So long as authors remain tempted by the pleasure of moralizing and criticizing behind the screen of fiction; and—so long as they remain overly-emotional, they will fail to pursue the Moral-Philosophical mode to its end, a Nirvana-like meditation on the ultimate challenge facing moral beings, that being death, not in its common conception but something, perhaps, resembling the death defined in my philosophy.

The other modes have their own dangers. The Aesthetical mode tempts authors with the pleasure of obscurity for the sake of avoiding comprehension, as if obscurity placed one beyond the claws of criticism, one’s own included. The pursuit of comedy can lead authors to the cruel/infantile or to the moral/satirical, of which only the latter is ever considered literature. Yet somehow, even such light works as Bridget Jones’ Diary, works that largely avoid the two pitfalls of comedy seem, for the time, destined to be excluded from literary discussion, never mind anthologies; likewise the hidden comical element in “serious” works seems destined to be overlooked until…

The Responsibility of Science or Art?

A Peculiar Trend Among Artists: Concern with social problems, occasionally a tendency to self-destruction that may be blamed on social isolation and the failure of certain forms of artistic expression to deeply satisfy the artist, but rarely if ever do artists commit crimes against others. A Reasonable Hypothesis: the arts develop the emotional and imaginative faculty that enables human beings to feel or imagine the pain of others.

Statistical and Scientific Projects for the Future: Measure the effects of education on moral development. Does a correlation exist between  education and crime? Not only between the lack of education and the financial and social needs that can lead to crime but between certain types of education and the greed and competitiveness that encourages certain forms of socially sanctioned yet “subtle” criminal behavior like the unsustainable exploitation of people one never sees, of the environment, and of one’s own mind. Murder and violence rates, as traditionally conceived, may be falling over time, but other crimes flourish.

A Question for Scientists: Does an education that promotes memorization and formulaic applications lead to mental instability? Thus far science has taken no account of the moral and psychological effects of education on humanity.

The Assumption of Science: Our teachers and professors of science operate on the assumption that the knowledge they give their students will be put to good use, but science demands proof. Students should be tracked after graduation (I’m half kidding) and their success as human beings, not only as employees, should be monitored and evaluated and the results should be used to inform hiring decisions and the future of education.

Hypothesis for Artists: some crimes are motivated, in part, by morbid curiosity to see or hear or feel something. The criminal mind half-imagines its intended crime, and then becomes fixated on it due to a lack of imaginative dexterity. The healthy imagination is dextrous and does not become fixated. Nevertheless, artists themselves continue to mistake images for beauty, whereas the great beauty is the dancing of consciousness as it apprehends the beautifully arranged pattern–a pattern that few images contain and none disclose to passive minds.

The Future Exodus

As rising ocean levels threaten heavily populated coastal regions, as disappearing glaciers threaten over a billion people dependent on glacier-fed rivers, as soil degradation leads to desertification and peak oil results in peak food, likely within this century we must choose between 1) global famine, war, and massive migrations to struggling urban centers and 2) alternative agricultural practices that have the potential to turn the world’s deserts into food-bearing forest gardens. Since, converting deserts into gardens will take time, preparing in advance in crucial.

Being an optimist, I foresee massive migrations of people into deserts; Asians armed with green knowledge will pour into the Australian and Indian and other deserts. North American cities will depopulate as millions migrate to the warm, inland, Southwest, and the same pattern will be occur across the globe. The Middle-East will be united in its common struggle to become green. Unity is crucial, especially as some evidence shows that desert rainfall patterns improve as vegetation returns.

Death as Thought: A Dialectic on the Real and the Ideal

What is death? While human words cannot explain what humans have not experienced, science claims that death is the end of life, and religion maintains that it is the door to the next life. But people still wonder, and death still inspires fear, outrage, and sometimes hope.

Beyond science and religion, there is still philosophy. For the philosopher, death is more than a single moment in time, it is also a thought to be thought at any time. Actually, this is misleading. Death is more than a thought, on close inspection it cannot be categorized as one among other thoughts; death is actually a part of thought and consciousness. Death is not a thought, or an object of consciousness ,so much as it is the non-object, the object-negating object. It is an action; it is the action that deletes objects of thought and frees consciousness for new objects. This means it is vital to change and imagination.

Trying to imagine one’s own death means performing the thought-event that deletes all known objects of consciousness, all memories, all beliefs and—and ultimately everything is a memory in relation to death. The death-though is a performative thought, a thought action that does something more than tell us about the future, it negates everything we know or remember in the present. And yet, this is still the death implied by science, for science foresees nothing for the individual consciousness after death.

If death represent the negation or deletion – in theory – of all objects of consciousness, death is integral to consciousness, for consciousness cannot exists as anything but a negation-production process. Simply put, without the ability to negate one thought we could never produce another; without leaving one thought we could never move on to the next. And so, even the smallest or most trivial thought process involves a small negation or a small death. What makes death so difficult for consciousness is that it demands we negate all thought-objects, which is arguably impossible and certainly unsustainable. Eliminating objects from consciousness by reducing mental activity and going into a vegetative state entirely eliminates the challenge posed by thinking about death, for death-as-though is a challenge which, to the highest degree, demands mental activity in active negating.

The benefit of treating death as the active negation of objects is that the mind grows strong in exercising itself with death-as-absolute-negation. In learning to negate any object of consciousness, the mind gains the only self-mastery it can ever have. It frees itself from the power exerted by objects of consciousness, eliminates all clinging and buries the idols. Of course, it also frees us from all that is good, but that is also good, for in freeing us it teaches us to value and love the good.

Negation, or the death-though, is intrinsic to all imaginative thinking, both in science and the arts. No new cause-and-effect relationship could even be imagined without the ability to negate the old; no new experiment could ever be attempted without the ability to imagine the new. The arts themselves would be an endless mimicking of natural phenomena and tradition if the mind were not able to negate, destroy, and make room for the new. Even someone who can speak a human language and chooses to shriek like an ape must have used their imagination first, however little, and in doing so they have performed a negation, though a small one that required no more than the negation of the thought of human language coming out of a human mouth.