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…
