Can You Love Writing That is Morally Repugnant?
There are some writers who have such pure, unquestionable talent that you can’t help falling in love with their prose. It doesn’t matter if they’re writing pages about dryer lint; the writing is so skillful, or so perfectly embodies something you wish you could do, that it doesn’t matter what’s being written about.
But what if the writing is on a morally questionable subject, or expresses a point of view that horrifies or disturbs you?
The question of separating aesthetics from morals has been circulating the literary world for decades, if not centuries. Is it possible, or preferable, to see beauty independent of its implications? Can anything morally repugnant ever be truly beautiful?
I came up against this problem with a few recent readings: first with Martin Amis’ Success and then with some short stories of George Saunders. Both writers are, undeniably, bursting with raw talent. For years, they have wowed readers with their distinctive styles and writerly verve. I’d be perfectly happy to have the ease and delight with which these masters play with language.
After the jump: what’s wrong with Amis and Saunders?
At the same time, I’m finding myself troubled by their work in different ways. Amis’ novel has some unquestionably troubling attitudes toward women. Not to give too much away, but rape, incest, and violent, objectifying portrayals of women dominate the book. The female characters have no agency and are the helpless victims of sexual violence, or the faceless objects of male fantasy. It’s a pretty grim outlook for a female or a feminist reader. On the other hand, there is Saunders, whose writing is similarly characterized by shocking violence, often towards women. It’s more clear that Saunders is writing satirically about such violence, but at the same time, I wonder if it’s wise to write so much about the systematic devaluing of human lives.
It leaves me with some hard questions to answer, and ultimately I think every reader has to answer them for him or herself. In the book that most famously challenges a reader’s attraction to beautiful writing, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, the author claims that moral writing of any kind is worthless. Pure aesthetics, he writes in an afterward, are the only essentials for literary art. And yet his words seem to be undermined by the challenging content of his novel about a child rapist. The reader is seduced by beautiful language, but is deeply disturbed by the treatment of young Dolores Haze. Ultimately I think any writer who claims aesthetics can justify any moral wrong in writing is not telling you the complete story. Because what I find in beautiful writing is the human. It is not just a stunning turn of phrase, but something inherently real about the phrase, about the observation of human behavior, that I find beautiful. It’s a personal choice, but for me, writers who keep us thinking about what makes us human write the most beautifully of all.
Sometimes I feel that the nature of the book (and therefore the questionable morals) often adds to the beauty of the book. There’s something unsettling about such great writing about a child rapist, and that’s the point. Nabokov wants you to question why he’s writing about these circumstances in such an aesthetically pleasing way. Denis Johnson does it, too, in Jesus’ Son. He uses beautiful language to describe drug addiction, abortion, and being a peeping-Tom. I think all people should read books that have a lack of morals.
This is a fascinating topic. I keep telling myself to read Lolita and then backing away from it.
The Nabokov comment about the worthlessness of moral writing intrigues me. I think it depends on what he means by moral writing. I can see how writing in a moralistic way could lack power because it tries to force the reader to feel a certain way. Writing that avoids moralism might produce more authentic emotions in a reader.
As an adult with my own moral compass and my own opinions, I don’t need moral writing to tell me what is right or wrong. As you put it so beautifully in the last part of your post, what moves me is the depiction of something human, something that feels real. It’s that kind of writing that expands my understanding of morality and ethics.
It’s tough to capture that authenticity when spouting morals or when having characters, even protagonists, always doing the “right” thing. On the other hand, when the author seems to have little concern for the inner struggles of her characters, or when the author treats his characters as bodies instead of people, I find myself unable to feel or care about the story.
So, yes, I think it is possible to love (or at least) appreciate some morally repugnant writing, so long as the writing does show some understanding of the complexity of being human. However, it is nearly impossible for me to love writing that contains characters who are either so good or so bad that I simply can’t recognize them as human beings. Saints have their flaws, and villains are capable of feeling something.
Thanks for the interesting post!