Stories
teach us how to live. We are born and raised in stories, and stories answer all
the big questions in life: who am I? why am I here? what should I do? Stories
are especially suited for answering the "ought" questions, perhaps
the most perplexing questions of all. For a hundred years and longer
intellectuals and culture shapers have been nervous about the categories of right
and wrong. We have tried to live as though these are merely words for opinion
or personal preference. One unintended consequence has been widespread moral
paralysis and passivity. We have, as individuals and as a culture, a greatly
diminished ability to say, "This is wrong, and this is right." We
still say these things, of course, because they are rooted in our nature; but
we have a hard time either defending or acting on what we say. Stories can
help.
Stories
call us into relationships-with characters and with the teller of the story.
And at the heart of all stories is choice, the necessity of choosing coupled
with the uncertainty of consequences. These two qualities of
storytelling-relationships with others, and the necessity of choosing-tie
literature inescapably to ethics and morality. Stories abound with questions of
"ought," and are therefore a powerful if imprecise embodiment of
humankind's preoccupation with right and wrong.
This
view has many enemies. Formalists, aestheticists, postmodernists and generic relativists
are among those who usually oppose attempts to find any consistent,
significant, or usable ethical content in literature. But their star is
setting, not least because they espouse views which, while often sophisticated,
ring false both in literature and in life. Literature is inescapably tied to
ethics and is useful in personal ethical development, thought, and action. This
is seen most clearly in the stories that arise from experiences of oppression.
People who have experienced evil most bluntly often feel compelled to put their
experience into story. And listening to that story with interest and compassion
not only is our ethical duty, but has the power to change us.
Any
argument for the usefulness of story in ethical understanding and behavior grows
out of the general argument for the power of literature to engage and change us
as human beings. Whatever makes literature of recurring interest also
contributes to its ethical dimension.
Literature
engages us because it is rooted. It tangles itself in the quotidian, concrete,
individualized nitty-gritty of human experience. If it often seeks the
transcendent and universal, it is always by way of the immanent and particular.
If it desires to speak to all humanity, it does so by telling us the story of one
or two particular human beings. It thereby starts where we ourselves live, with
characters in a context faced with decisions. It does not really matter if the
characters masquerade as animals or aliens, or if the context is distant in
time or place. All stories are about us, or someone who is somehow like us.
Literature
also engages the whole person. It elicits a response from all parts of the
traditional division of human beings-mental, spiritual, and physical. (The
rhythms and rhymes of language affect the body as well as the mind.) Jean-Paul
Sartre argues that it is in fact the moral responsibility of the reader to
"give himself generously" to a work, bringing to a reading "the
gift of his whole person, with his passions, prepossessions, his sympathies,
his sexual temperament, and his scale of values."{1}If
we listen to a story with only one ear, we do not listen fairly.
Sartre's
argument points to the empathy-creating power of the imagination, a power
exercised both by the writer and the reader. Literature invites us into
relationships-relationships between writers and readers, between characters and
readers, between all of these and the world (both society and nature), between
readers and other readers, and, sometimes, between the reader and God. Such
relationships have the potential to change us and are fraught with ethical
considerations.
Stories
are flares sent into the night sky. William James claimed that the greatest gap
which exists in all of nature is the gap between one human mind and another.
John Steinbeck is only one of many writers who have observed the role that
literature has played in humankind's ongoing and exhaustive attempts to bridge
that gap:
A
writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending
signals. . . . We are lonesome animals. We spend our life trying to be less
lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to
say-and to feel-"Yes, that's the way it is, or at least that's the way I
feel it. You're not as alone as you thought."{2}
A
reader's willingness to empathize with characters in a narrative or the speaker
in a poem is itself a moral act (as is the writer's willingness to portray at
least some characters sympathetically). It is parallel to attending to the
story of a friend. Alexander Solzhenitsyn's narrator in One Day in the
Life of Ivan Denisovich wonders whether it is possible for one human
being to genuinely understand or care about the suffering of another, in this
case in a Siberian labor camp: "How can you expect a man who's warm to
understand a man who's cold?"{3} That
Solzhenitsyn writes the novel suggests that he believes such understanding is
possible-if he tells the story well enough.
Simone
Weil has said that morality is not a matter of will, but of attention. We
cannot act rightly until we have attended, given our attention, to that which
requires us to act. Literature is a powerful focuser of attention. It puts
before us situations that require of us a response, both in the context of the
fictional world and, by implication, in the nonfictional world in which we live
(and resists any absolute separation of the two).
This
ability of literature to generate valuable moments of attention points to the
tie between story and memory. Part of literature's ethical value is that it
preserves human experience for contemplation and evaluation. It snares fleeting
human reality in characters, actions, metaphors, and all the other elements of
literature, giving us the opportunity to sift, judge, reflect, evaluate, laugh
about, cry over, and all the other things we are prone to do with our
experience.
Yet
do not stories also distort and sometimes even falsify our experience?
Inevitably. But that is not an argument for dismissing the ethical value of
literature. It is rather an argument for telling and preserving as many
different stories as possible, so that collectively they can witness to more of
the whole truth of the human experience than can any one story or handful of
stories. This is a need rightly manifested in the current concern for hearing
from people whose stories historically have not been told. The cure for
inadequate stories is more stories from different tellers.
Some
theologians and ethicists have argued that understanding narrative and one's
relation to it is not just helpful but in fact is the key to moral and ethical
development. Paul Nelson summarizes this movement:
The
fundamental idea underlying the variety of claims made on behalf of narrative
is that narrative, or story, is ingredient to understanding the self, social
groups, and their histories. According to some philosophers, a moral view is
not so much chosen as inherited from one's family and one's religious and
political communities; in short, from one's social world. The moralities into
which we are socialized are not so much sets of rules or principles as they are
collections of stories about human possibilities and paradigms for action.
These stories are said to disclose who we are, where we have been, and where we
are going, thereby allowing us to locate our position in the larger scheme of
things.{4}
Alasdair
MacIntyre, perhaps the most influential contemporary ethicist, says that
without access to the community's stories, children literally do not know how
to behave: "Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted,
anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words." {5} These
stories include, of course, much more than is narrowly regarded as literature,
but the argument points to the life-shaping potential of all narrative,
including literary narrative.
Stories
tell us who we are, with the understanding that who we are is greatly shaped by
the community of which we are a part. (The universal in us is a product of our
common humanity as colored by our particular community). And who we are
unavoidably raises the host of ethical questions about how we should live.
Benton Lewis, an Apache Indian, puts it in a way that might disconcert a strict
literary formalist or relativist, but delights any lover of straightforward
words: "Stories go to work on you like arrows. Stories make you live
right."{6}
A
wonderful and fearful consequence of our human freedom is that we can be
different from how we are. Because we have been created as characters with
choices, we are capable of modifying our lives in light of our experience.
Literature-engaging us holistically, rooted in concrete experience, and drawing
us into empathetic relationship-has more potential to change us than most
influences in our lives. Such potential for change has tremendous moral and
ethical implications which we dare not ignore or explain away.
Nowhere
is the ethical dimension of literature more readily apparent than in the
literature of the oppressed. This literature arises out of and is a conscious
response to dehumanization and the denial of individual value. It cuts across boundaries
of nationality, politics, religion, gender, age, and class, and includes
literature that arises as a response to the Holocaust, totalitarianism, racism,
sexism and the like. This literature raises the whole range of ethical
questions, but especially those which center on justice and respect for human
beings.
The
literature of the oppressed covers a great variety of writing and writers and
historical contexts. There are, however, recurring emphases and strategies that
link otherwise divergent works, each with profound ethical implications. One of
these centers on the concept of telling one's story.
Perhaps
the one thing most widely insisted on in the literature of the oppressed is the
need and right to tell one's story, both one's own and the community's. This is
implicit of course in all of literature, as we have seen. But it is even more
urgent in the literature of the oppressed because that right has so often been
denied.
In
the foreword to Fontamara, a novel dealing with the exploitation of
Italian peasants, Ignazio Silone argues for the right of everyone to be heard:
"Let everyone, then, have the right to tell his story in his own
way."{7} Both
aspects are crucial-to tell one's story and to tell it in one's own way of
speaking-and both have ethical implications. Suppressing people's stories,
whether consciously (as when slaves were forbidden to learn to read and write)
or unconsciously, is immoral. But so may be presuming to speak for someone (as
well-meaning reformers often have done) or requiring them to speak only in the
public language. The black poet Langston Hughes understood this:
.
. . someday somebody'll Stand up and talk about me. And write about me- Black
and beautiful- And sing about me, And put on plays about me! And I reckon it'll
be Me myself! Yes, it'll be me.{8}
One
of the problems with telling one's story in one's own way is that the oppressor
often controls language. The Polish poet and Nobel Laureate, Czeslaw Milosz,
could not tell his story in his own country when it was under Communist rule:
"The exile of a poet is today a simple function of a relatively recent
discovery: that whoever wields power is also able to control language and not
only with the prohibitions of censorship but also by changing the meaning of
words. . . . [W]hole zones of reality cease to exist simply because they have
no name."{9} This
is why merely telling one's story can be a revolutionary act-and it is not only
Communists who suppress stories.
The
opportunity to tell one's story is at the heart of our sense of justice. All
legal systems call for the airing of stories, including that of the accused, as
the necessary precondition for justice being done. The right to speak is given
to the vilest criminal. (God even allowed Adam and Eve a chance to tell their
side.) But there is also an ethical responsibility to listen to these stories,
and to listen without prejudgment. We recognize that a court which goes through
the motions of listening to the accused but which has already made its decision
beforehand is not a just court. As there are ethical implications in allowing
the marginalized to tell their stories in literature, there are also great
implications in how we listen and respond.
The
literature of the oppressed believes not only in the right of and need for
storytelling, but also in its power. Storytelling can change things-within the
storyteller, within the hearers, and, perhaps, even within the larger society.
Most of all, storytelling has the power to heal. A battered woman in the
opening line of a short story by Jane Augustine reveals the psychological
necessity of bearing witness: "If I don't tell someone, I'm not sure what
will happen. I'll crack perhaps." {10}
Similarly,
Leslie Marmon Silko begins Ceremony, a novel about the search of a
young Native American man for healing from the fragmentation of broken
traditions, with a chant-like invocation:
I
will tell you something about stories, They aren't just entertainment. Don't be
fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and
death. You don't have anything if you don't have the stories. Their evil is
mighty but it can't stand up to our stories. So they try to destroy the stories
let the stories be confused or forgotten. They would like that They would be
happy Because we would be defenseless then. He rubbed his belly. I keep them
here Here, put your hand on it See, it is moving. There is life here for the
people.{11}
Much
of the power of story in the literature of the oppressed is tied to memory.
Remembering is a way of keeping alive a reality that would otherwise be
lost-especially important when an oppressor wants that reality forgotten. Elie
Wiesel, Holocaust survivor, sees his writing as act of remembering with
particular moral significance:
But
for me writing is a matzeva, an invisible tombstone, erected to the
memory of the dead unburied. Each word corresponds to a face, a prayer, the one
needing the other so as not to sink into oblivion. . . . Thus, the act of
writing is for me often nothing more than the secret or conscious desire to
carve words on a tombstone: to the memory of a town forever vanished, to the
memory of a child in exile, to the memory of all those I loved and who, before
I could tell them I loved them, went away. {12}
Although
powerfully drawn to silence, Wiesel sees his writing as standing against the ultimate
devaluation of human worth: "you do not exist."
Remembering
well is not only a way of resisting evil, but is a form of protection. Both
Milosz and Solzhenitsyn, in accepting their Nobel Prizes, explored the
devastating effects of a people without memory, taken from them in Eastern
Europe and the Soviet Union and willingly abandoned in the West. Each sees
memory as a "force" which "protects us,"{13} and
looks to literature as a primary embodiment of that memory.
If
the centrality of telling one's story is one characteristic of the literature
of the oppressed, the unembarrassed appeal to moral criteria is another. Simply
put, this literature has not been cowed by fashionable contemporary relativism.
It frequently invokes standards of right and wrong which would be an
embarrassment (and even a cause for suppression) for many academics and shapers
of contemporary culture, except for the irony that these claims are coming from
people whom these same academics support on political and social grounds in
their calls for justice. Having guarded against mixing morals and literature
from social conservatives, fearing the kind of censorship that has often
resulted in the past, the makers of contemporary culture have been uncertain as
to how to react to the moral appeals of the literature of the oppressed.
This
appeal is usually to a moral order by which the oppressors, despite their
power, are seen to be aberrant moral outlaws, and the oppressed, despite their
seeming powerlessness, are seen as representatives of moral order. In the West
the moral order appealed to has often been the Judeo-Christian one, broadly
conceived. Black spirituals, for instance, call out to that aspect of the tradition
which emphasizes God's concern for the powerless and oppressed at the hands of
the powerful, taking comfort in the Jehovah God who strikes down evil rulers
and taskmasters and the Jesus who heals the sick, feeds the hungry, and
chastises the powerful.
Alice
Walker's The Color Purple, however, illustrates that other
parts of the literature of the oppressed look not to religious traditions
(though there is a nod to that in Walker's novel) but to the equally old
secular humanist tradition, especially as it has manifested itself in recent
years with the celebration of concepts such as self-esteem, self-fulfillment,
individual rights, and the like.
This
overt appeal to moral criteria, in fact, distinguishes the literature of the
oppressed not only from most other contemporary literature but also from the
prevailing tone of most popular culture in recent decades. The literature of
the oppressed tends to follow Solzhenitsyn in his identification of the central
point for which he stands:
Those
people who have lived in the most terrible conditions, on the frontier between
life and death, be it people from the West or from the East, they all
understand that between good and evil there is an irreconcilable contradiction,
that it is not one and the same thing-good or evil-that one cannot build one's
life without regard to this distinction.{14}
Solzhenitsyn's
view of good and evil is clearly influenced by his Christian worldview. Others
who do not share his faith have shared similar experiences with evil and good,
convincing them of the existential reality of moral categories and of the
necessity of affirming them in everyday life and exploring them in literature.
A
third characteristic of the literature of the oppressed with significant
ethical overtones is its emphasis on community. Oppressed groups-from medieval
Jews to nineteenth-century feminists to contemporary blacks and Polish
workers-have recognized the importance of community and solidarity for
survival. Even the seemingly powerless discover their power when they band
together. That oppressors recognize this power is clear from the repeated
attempts in history to deny the oppressed those things necessary for a sense of
community (for example, their language, religion, and ceremonies).
Perhaps
the fundamental ethical impulse in the literature of the oppressed is to reject
those forces that would deny the oppressed their full humanity, and to insist
on the dignity and worth of each person. Yet, unlike the individualistic
emphasis of much of contemporary literature and culture, the worth of the
individual in the literature of the oppressed is much more likely to be rooted
in that person's identification with a larger community and tradition.
This
sense of community often gives the writers a feeling of mission not often found
among other contemporary writers. Alice Walker says, "I am preoccupied
with the spiritual survival, the survival whole of my people."{15} Solzhenitsyn
has dedicated his life to preserving through literature the modern history of
Russia (and thereby the Russian soul) in an era when official Russian history
has been a web of lies. Wiesel, as we have seen, writes in part to preserve the
memory of a whole culture that has been destroyed.
At
its best this sense of mission translates into rich explorations of lost
history, into moral passion, into delight and discovery, into a mutually
beneficial concern for one's readers-in short, into powerful literature that
makes the world different for its having been written. At its worst, it reduces
the writer to cliché-ridden propagandist and sermonizer.
Herein
lies one objection to exploring the ethical dimension of literature. Allowing
ethical criteria into literary judgment, it is argued, distorts the nature of
art by emphasizing content over form. What one says becomes more important than
how one says it, reducing art to ideology and argument. Naively applied,
ethical criticism can lead to the equating of good writing with that which
agrees with my values and bad writing with that which disagrees.{16} The
"committed" writer may become more interested in supporting a side
than in investigating the world.
In
a related problem, how does one make ethical judgments anyway in a relativistic
world? Value claims are commonly seen not as references to objective reality
but as expressions of opinion. If we allow for the ethical dimension of
literature, whose ethics are we going to invoke in our criticism?
And
even if we can agree on the values which literature should reinforce, is there
any evidence that literature and art change anything? Does even a great poem or
novel or painting make the world any different, much less any better? Many
critics have thought not. Oscar Wilde offered one of the most famous dismissals
of the ethical criticism of literature at the end of the last century: "There
is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly
written. That is all."
These
objections are not without merit. Even the literature of the oppressed itself
acknowledges profound questions about the efficacy of literature and art to do
justice to extreme human experiences. One of those questions has to do with the
efficacy of language to capture experiences beyond the normal categories.
Wiesel says that it is not possible to write a novel about Treblinka. Either it
will not be a novel, or it will not be about Treblinka.{17} George
Steiner claims that "the world of Auschwitz lies outside speech as it lies
outside reason." {18}
Further,
experiences of genocide or other examples of great cruelty call into question
the traditional relationship between the external world and the imagination.
For the last two hundred years at least, we have thought of the imagination as
running ahead of daily reality, giving form to that which as yet has not been
conceived, to that which has yet to happen. With an event like the Holocaust,
physical reality outstrips the imagination. We were not able to imagine
genocide; we were not able to imagine the intentional mass gassing of women and
men; we were not able to imagine doctors amputating the healthy limbs of
children just to study the reaction. Having discovered the literal truth, how
is the imagination, or literature, ever going to catch up? How will it ever
regain its status as that which runs ahead?
Even
to the extent that it succeeds, is not literature about great human suffering a
kind of exploitation? While the formalist/aestheticist argues that art must
transform experience into an aesthetic form if it is to be art, another view
protests that such a goal is in some cases itself immoral. Aestheticizing
suffering by giving it artistic form, and therefore giving its audience
pleasure (aesthetically even if they are otherwise repulsed or saddened), is
fundamentally immoral. The extreme of this view was expressed by T.W. Adorno in
his famous declaration that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.{19}
Finally,
there are some among the writers of the oppressed who seem to deny the very
existence of a moral order to which anyone can appeal. Tadeusz Borowski'sThis
Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen openly refuses to divide the
world of the concentration camp into the just and the unjust. His first-person
protagonist, modeled on Borowski himself, inhabits a world where such
distinctions are sentimental holdovers from a long-dead world. A variety of
Holocaust writers testify to the attraction of silence and even madness as the
most appropriate and ethical response to inexpressible human evil and seeming
divine indifference.
As
powerful as these collected objections might be, they are more compelling in
warning us to proceed carefully in looking to literature for moral sustenance
than they are in showing that doing so is illegitimate or unprofitable. The
long-dominant claims of aestheticism do not stand up to close inspection. In
trying to remove literature from a potential quagmire of ethical controversy by
asserting that only form is ultimately significant, aestheticism fails to
recognize that such an assertion is itself an ethical one. Moreover,
Christopher Clausen points out that Wilde's famous dictum-that books are not moral
or immoral, only well or poorly written-fails to consider the "bearing
that the moral shallowness or profundity of a book might have on whether, all
things considered, it is well or badly written."{20}
Some
postmodernist literary critics have gone beyond the formalists and declared
that not only must content be subsumed under form, but that language, because
of its radical instability, is not even capable of conveying shareable meaning.
This claim is often made in the context of opposing oppressive power structures
and their domination of discourse. What these critics fail to see, it seems, is
that this view of language reinforces rather than undercuts oppression. If
language cannot convey meaning, then the powerless are silenced and doomed to
their fate. Even physical revolution depends on persuasion. Milosz understands
this when he says that totalitarian states have nothing to fear from theories
of literature that see it as a totally self-contained, self-referential world
with no significant link to other areas of human experience-a view both the
formalists and postmodernists support.{21}
The
relativist claim that conflicting ethical values and evaluations render all
ethical claims for literature useless is equally suspect. It confuses cultural
pluralism (the existence of many views) with metaphysical relativism (the lack
of any knowable truth). Dis-agreement about ethical judgment, in literature or
elsewhere, no more makes such judgments meaningless than does disagreement
about the shape of the earth render the earth without shape. There is no more
diversity and disagreement in ethical matters than there is in purely aesthetic
ones, or in any other area of human inquiry for that matter. Everything
valuable is also controversial.
Further,
radical relativists invariably cannot live out their professed views. Every
critic who claims, openly or implicitly, that ethics have nothing to do with
literary judgment then proceeds without exception to fill his or her criticism
and theories with assertions that are fundamentally ethical in nature.
One
practical response to the problem of diversity of values and judgments lies in
the notions of community and conversation. Critics as diverse as Stanley Fish
and Wayne Booth have explored the possibilities for limiting radical
subjectivity in literary judgments by emphasizing the practical and verifiable
benefits of sharing our judgments together in respectful and sympathetic
discourse. The goal is not unanimity, but a consensus of shared judgment that
approaches the condition of wisdom, not unlike the process of moral and
character development that ethicists see happening on as an individual
internalizes the stories of the community.
Wiesel
gives a powerful answer to the objections raised about the ethical value of
literature, including those he raises himself. He asks, quite simply, what is
the alternative to writing about right and wrong? To be silent-or, I would add,
cynical-is to be complicitous with evil. Wiesel and many others write with a
painfully clear awareness of the limitations of language, and the moral
pitfalls awaiting those who would bear witness, but also with a sense of
obligation to the dead that makes all dangers worthwhile.
Does
literature have the power to change anything? The testimony of countless men
and women over thousands of years is too compelling to seriously doubt it. If
our experience in the world shapes us at all, including how we act in this
world, how can we possibly believe that literature, which engages our whole
person in ways that very few human experiences do, has no significant effect on
us? If one young person reads The Diary of Anne Frank, or any other
story, and resolves to live differently in light of an expanded understanding
of the possibilities of life, do we have any way of showing that resolve to be
illusory and without effect in the real world?
Human
beings are inescapably creatures of "ought." Indeed, that may be what
is most unique about us. This sense of ought permeates everything we do,
including our works of the imagination. Such works, powerful and compelling,
are potential treasure-houses in which we can conduct some of our most
important conversations about what we ought to be and do. And there is no
essential difference between the stories of literature and the stories of our
lives. We are each characters in our own story and in each other's stories.
Healthy stories, as we have heard, can "make us live right."
{1}
John-Paul Sarte, What is Literature? (New York: Harper 1948; trans. Bernard
Frechtman, 1965), 36.
{2}
John Steinbeck, Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (New York: Viking,
1976), 183.
{3} Alexander
Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Trans. Ralph Parker; New
York: New American Library, 1963), 34 .
{4}
Paul Nelson, Narrative and Morality: A Theological Inquiry (University Park,
Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987), 9.
{5} Alasdair
MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press,
1981), 216.
{6} Wayne
C. Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988), 324.
{7} Ignazio
Silone, Foreword, Fontamara, Trans. Eric Mosbacher (New York: New American
Library, 1981), 20.
{8} Claudia
Tate, ed., Black Women Writers at Work (New York: Continuum, 1984), xxvi.
{9} Czeslaw
Milosz, Nobel Lecture (New York: Farrar Straus, 1980), 13.
{10} Mary
Anne Ferguson, Images of Women in Literature (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 4th
ed., 1986), 88.
{11}
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony ( New York: Viking Penguin, 1977), 2.
{12}
Elie Wiesel, Legends of Our Time (New York: Avon, 1968), 25, 26.
{13} Milosz,
21.
{14} Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
"The Vision of Solzhenitsyn," Firing Line (Columbia, S.C.: Southern
Educational Communications, 1976), 4.
{15} Alice
Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Harcourt,
1983), 250.
{16} Booth,
388.
{17}
Elie Wiesel, et al, Dimensions of the Holocaust: Lectures at Northwestern
University (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1977), 7.
{18}
Lawrence L. Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (New York: Yale
University Press, 1975), 14.
{19} Langer,
{20}
Christopher Clausen, The Moral Imagination: Essays on Literature and Ethics
(Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986), ix.
{21}
Milosz, 13.
