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 18th 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.
