The Virtue of Writing, An Introduction
An Introduction
There is no such thing, that great figure of American morality Andrew Mellon said, as an act of virtue that goes unpunished.
It often seems that the act of addressing the very subject of virtue is its own punishment. Wherever we turn these days we hear a latest crisis described in terms of morality, and we are all aware of ballplayers and bench-scientists and doctors and stockbrokers and congressmen and, for that matter, prime ministers and presidents who are suddenly called to task for having failed an ethical standard. Even if the accused claim, as they always seem to, that such standards are imposed arbitrarily and after the fact, we have all grown accustomed to a broad discussion of ethical norms in the public forum, although it is not clear that such discussion does much either for the behavior of ballplayers or stockbrokers, or for our understanding of the large moral principles that are presumed to undergird our society.
When it comes to making so-called moral judgments about writing, even those of us who are interested in the meaning of virtue today can hardly avoid starting off by feeling squeamish. We know what writers from Celine to Lawrence to Joyce to Nabokov have suffered in the name of virtue, and we must assume that other writers of such stature did not survive the blast of moral judgment the way these lucky geniuses did.
Yet, unlike those of ballplayers and stockbrokers and even politicians, perhaps there is something in the project itself of writing that requires a direct confrontation with the question of morality. We may be no better prepared for a serious discussion of virtue than anyone, but as writers and readers don’t we find that the very material — the novel, the play, the poem, the film, the story — forces us to face the question of moral meaning?
But if the general question of morality is implicit in writing, it always brings with it a string of troubling particular questions. Do aesthetic judgments and moral judgments coincide? Is a writer’s responsibility to transcend society or to change it? How should we respond to works that blatantly offend a prevailing morality? What about works that offend nothing, bending over backwards, like a parent-pleasing child, to be “good”? What is “good” anyway?
As Mellon promised, this talk of virtue can seem like its own punishment not only because of the moralizing or the guilt-mongering that often accompanies it, but because of our genuine lack of clarity on the subject. We can and do argue both sides of all these questions, but more often people like us tend to stay out of the argument. We leave it to those who are less squeamish than we, less inclined, perhaps, to see the nuances of such questions, to be paralyzed by them. And that withdrawal from this discussion is our great mistake, the one that nearly cost us Ulysses and Lolita and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and that has certainly cost us comparable works we’ve never heard of. People who glibly enunciate moral principles in condemning books always claim to be speaking for the ages, but we suspect that they are giving expression to the least examined conventions of their own time and place. So when someone introduces the subject of the “virtue of writing,” we instinctively interrupt the program to ask, Whose virtue? Whose morality? Whose notions both of good behavior and of the ultimate human good? The Pope’s? The Ayatollah’s? Oliver North’s? Ian Paisley’s?
That interruption — what by now has become our convention, a confrontation with widely discredited figures of moral authority — is as far as we usually get in the discussion of morality. We not only refuse to answer the question in terms set by tyrants or prigs, but we mostly go on then to avoid the question altogether. Believing that the world has more to fear from its self-anointed saints than from its sinners, we refuse to use morality as an overt criterion of literary evaluation, as in fact we refuse to use it in the political sphere in all but the most blatant cases of lust or greed. We behave as if moral concern itself has become a form of bigotry. The virtue of writing? If virtue is in any way its subject — not to mention its object — won’t writing necessarily be didactic, appealing to some authority outside itself, which by definition makes the writing shallow, the morality superficial? Whose virtue? The other question of course is, Whose writing? Fiction from the pulpit — isn’t that mostly what we call pulp?
The fact that we are people whose easy belief in the great traditions and figures of ethical discourse has been eroded makes us very reluctant to accept one of the obvious and inevitable consequences of that erosion. The two large questions of moral meaning — one particular: what is good behavior? One universal: what is the human good? — no longer belong as a kind of property to the robed custodians of the various patriarchies. Those questions belong to all of us. And that is why we simply must not yield this discussion to people no longer qualified to lead it. As writers, as critics, as play — and filmgoers, as readers, we must not let the fact that this subject makes us squirm in our chairs prevent us from claiming it as our own. We should see in our squirming evidence of its importance. That we live, in the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s phrase, “after virtue” means that we must simply, in some way, reinvent a way of talking to each other about this question, of talking to ourselves about it. No one is more centrally involved in that task than are writers.
The ploughshare is the sharpened blade of the plow, the thing that cuts the furrow. But it is also, in our culture, a moral symbol. The founders of this magazine made a moral and political statement when they chose its name, and it is that aspect of the meaning of Ploughshares that this issue emphasizes. It is dedicated to the idea that writing, and in particular the writing of fiction, is a morally serious enterprise; and more than that, that fiction inevitably involves us in a mode of thinking which is, at its core, thinking about morality. In an age — this is what “after virtue” means — when every other mode of thinking about morality is debased, this characteristic of fiction is its great virtue.
Fiction writers, including, no doubt, the writers collected in this issue, are reluctant to have their work discussed in terms of morality not just because the self-designated moral experts so often seem to be right-wingers whose “morality” is so patently a thumb in the dike holding back social change. Despite the thrust of most debate on the subject, and despite the myths of Joyce and Lawrence, the fiction writer’s greatest enemy is not the would-be censor in society, but the would-be censor in the writer’s own head. Morality is a problem for a serious fiction writer first because the writer’s own work consists essentially in an unfettered confrontation with his or her own immorality. The first freedom from censorship is the internal, personal freedom to plumb that forbidden depth. Fiction begins in the writer’s search for value and meaning in his or her own experience, but that involves the writer, by definition, in an emotional and intellectual exploration of exactly those moments in his or her experience when value and meaning were lacking. What do we write about if not about falling short, limitation, fallenness, flaws, jealousy, greed, lust, worry, despair? Even writers who work the sunny side can authentically celebrate the triumphs of human life — love, but also hope and faith — only in the context of what they triumph over. To use the last dirty word, the one our insurance companies and divorce courts have proscribed, what they triumph over is “fault.”
Fiction writers do not want to be told that their subject — much less their social function — has to do with virtue because they know better than anyone that the realm of virtue is not their realm. Fiction writers live in the realm of what is wrong with the world — with their own worlds — not of what is right with it. In the age of “no-fault,” fiction writers are fault-finders. But unlike the moralists and finger-waggers, fiction writers find fault first in themselves. There is never a moral failing of which they accuse others that they have not first — because this is the way the invention of fiction works — accused themselves. A highly developed sensitivity to fault, a gift for feeling the pain of it, is what inspires, prompts and even enables them to do their work. Their work is nothing but cutting through the surface, as with that ploughshare, then going down. They are not like farmers but miners, for they go down into the dark hole of their own feelings. The veins of ore to which they take their pickaxes — their words, their stories — are like the veins of the earth which give us what is precious, veins arranged along what we call “faultlines.”
Faultlines are places where the incompatibles meet, where plates rub against each other, generating heat, sometimes making things explode and changing the face of the earth. It isn’t the metaphoric stone in the heart that makes for human sorrow, but the two stones, two huge plates of stone, how they rub against each other and force us to choose between them. When censors and censorious critics tell writers that they are bad for what they do, writers already know it. In a way that seems perverse even to them, they prize what’s wrong with the world. They value the crush along the faultlines because of the energy it generates, the renewal it promises, though they know too the havoc it wreaks when it quakes the surface or, as in Annie Dillard’s volcano in this issue, explodes.
What writers do is very difficult and very rare. They dig down to the world’s secret — their own version of it — having already committed themselves to reveal its truth without knowing in advance what it is. They are like the first nuclear scientists in that sense and unlike farmers and miners who always know what the earth holds for them. Fiction writers do not know what they are bringing up from below. That is the first law of the process of fiction which involves going from a felt experience of the unarticulated secret — the hidden fault — to an expression of that secret in a story which reveals its meaning, repudiating the fault, redeeming it, forgiving it, turning from it — or, as happens more often perhaps, none of these. The writer is devoted in advance not to some respectable notion of “virtue” or of “the good” or of “morality,” but to this process itself, wherever it leads. That is why writers reject so fiercely standards that are imposed from outside the process. Standards that have the strongest claim on the writer’s conscience — those that may truly embody the good — are the very ones that seem most dangerous, most likely to lead to the violation of fiction’s method, and therefore the very ones that the writer wants most fiercely to reject. “I could have become a saint,” the French poet Leon Bloy said. “I have become a writer instead.”
This is not to claim for writing an immunity from the normal requirements of decency that apply to all human endeavors. Writers are not ignorant of or indifferent to the dehumanizing potential of what they do. They are the first to ask of a work, their own included, whether it diminishes life or enhances it. We can all think of narratives that have reinforced, exploited or even stimulated sadistic, violent, racist, sexist or merely banal impulses. We can think of such books, plays, films and especially television shows by the hundreds, and of course they should never have been written. But even these obvious cases of the “immoral,” which none of us knowingly defend or purposefully write, are not enough to make the writer declare a prior loyalty to the structures of an orthodox morality.
The moral meaning of fiction resides in this: that the process of fiction itself has become the writer’s absolute. To the objection, “What if the thing you draw up from below in this way is monstrous?” the writer answers, “It always is.” Why? Because monstrous is the fate of every human being. Every human story ends badly; every story we write, even those that have what we call a “happy ending,” is a steel blade plunged into that truth. What are we talking about here but death? Death is the source of our narrative literature, for every story is an attempt, however implicit, to account for it. Death, which in nature is so essential to the earth’s cycles and which is therefore, to the earth, a morally neutral event, is to human beings nevertheless and forever a personal and moral outrage. Death is the fault at the heart of existence, the fault from which all other faults flow. What are greed or lust or racism or addiction or envy unto murder, even, but ways we devise — heartless, pointless, futile ways — not to avoid dying, but to avoid the knowledge of our dying? Such bad acts, from petty selfishness to heinous crimes, are our faults, but they come in response to this greater fault that we did not create. The fault, one dares to say, of God.
To repeat, the moral meaning of fiction resides in this: that the process of fiction itself has become the writer’s absolute. The writer’s absolute, therefore, has to do with discovery, with knowledge and with articulation. Faced with the mystery of evil — all those faults and Fault Itself — the writer opens his or her eyes and defies the cultural rule of blindness to see death for what it is. The writer defies the cultural rule of silence, too, by breaking the silence with words. Blindness and silence are the twin aspects of the massive denial it is the writer’s function to repudiate. The writer, by definition, violates the great human rule of denial in the face of death, speaking aloud what everyone says is unspeakable.
Does the writer do this to shock the reader? No, but because the blindness and silence of denial have so often been buttressed by claims to divine inspiration, the writer’s work can just as often seem like blasphemy, and be denounced as such. Every occupation has its great hazard, and such denunciation, whether it ever comes explicitly or not, is every writer’s. That accounts for the passionate solidarity the authors of this volume feel for Salman Rushdie and Marianne Wiggins. We mention them at last. They are the center of our concern. We dedicate this work to them.
The opposite of fault, as Kierkegaard put it, is not virtue but faith. Ironically, the writer dares to speak what the rule-makers have declared unspeakable not out of impiety but out of a radical faith, a faith so implicit in this process that the writer himself or herself may be unaware of it. What faith? Why, faith in the human process itself. It is not too much to claim that the narrative method is a kind of sacrament, an outward sign visible to every person, pointing beyond itself to the larger reality in which it exists, the reality of the human method. More simply put, the structure of story reveals the structure of human experience. Writing even out of and about faults and Fault Itself expresses inevitably the convictions that discovery, however unsettling, and knowledge, however unwanted, lead to meaning; and that meaning saves us. Our ability to grasp meaning, even in the tragic, is what makes us human. This is the affirmation at the heart of fiction — once we tell a story about death, we have transcended death. Once we have arranged the chaos of our experience into a narrative structure with a beginning, a middle and an end, we have changed chaos into cosmos. Fiction writers believe, whether they choose to make this belief explicit or not, that the deepest secret of existence is not the fault that divides, but the order that unifies. The opposite of fault, which is apparent, is not virtue but faith in the unity which is not.
The unity is what the fiction writer goes down into the dark hole for. The word for the unifying structure he or she comes up with, by the miracle of this process, is narrative, what we also call story, what we know as the work, the creation, but what the writer regards always as the gift.
The great moral problem of our age — as it has been of every age — is the human being’s constitutional inability to perceive this unity. Without a felt experience of the unity of one’s own life — how its beginning leads to its middle which leads to its end — one lacks a sense of selfhood. We talk about the self as if it were a detached, free-floating, wildly independent entity, but narrative reveals how the fate of one person is always and inevitably entangled with the fate of others.
What are we talking about here if not the so-called “moral issues” of our day? Morality is this unity. Immorality — say, our ability as a people to write off the destitute or, worse, to walk over them on the way into our cozy room; our blindness to the fact that in this economic order their plight is required by our privilege — immorality is the condition of a pervasive disunity. Even what passes for “moral concern” in our culture — the emphasis on charity, say, instead of justice; fatcats throwing high-ticket benefits for the homeless while also fighting tax increases — reflects the atomized spirit of the times to which we all belong. We divide public morality from private, aesthetic values from ethical. We are back to the problem we began with: the fact that moral discourse itself is alienating.
Fiction, on the other hand, unifies by laying bare the unity that already undergirds existence — or it does nothing. In the smallest of technical ways — the “elements of style,” sentences, paragraphs, rhythm, plot, character, mood, theme — and in the largest way of all, fiction unifies. If you want, you can say with Coleridge that fiction “reconciles.” This is the moral standard we apply in our evaluation of writing: does it combat blindness? We wanted to blind ourselves to the coming of death, but blinded ourselves to each other. Does this work open our eyes? Fiction must be judged by its own absolute standard, the harshest standard of all. Anything that deadens our senses or undercuts our ability to perceive what binds us to each other and for that matter — here is the wonder of this unity — to all that exists is to be rejected! Fiercely rejected, although never with a death sentence attached. If we reject fiction that blinds and silences, it is for the sake of fiction that sees and speaks; if we reject writers who are superfluous, it is for the sake of writers we need. We must protect the enterprise of literature in ways that the enterprises of religion and politics have not been protected. We must understand that our survival as human beings — emphasis on human — is at stake here. What else, finally, does “moral” mean? Of course fiction must be moral, only moral!
Where would the world be without, in John Gardner’s phrase, its moral fiction? In the dark hole, that’s where. In that shaft, that abyss. People would be alone, cut off from one another and from any real sense of themselves. Moral fiction enables readers to identify with — become one with — someone else’s experience. That knack of identification is the simple antidote to the deadliest form of our moral malady, our inability to feel with others, to understand them, to stand — under the weight of what they carry.
The fiction in this issue of Ploughshares, for example, dramatizes a broad range of human experience, men and women confronting illness, stale marriages, family lies, the pervasive sense of aftermath, the longing for a second chance, the end of adolescence, the threat of the exotic, the worse threat of the familiar, and the perfect pain of always wanting more. The stories here are examples of moral fiction not because the behavior of characters fits a particular pattern or because proper political positions are espoused, or because in some obvious or easy way they uplift or edify. These stories are doors into other worlds, other lives. By entering them, by assuming them, readers can quicken their eagerness for the other itself. A deeply felt, intelligent experience of other worlds and other lives provides our only access not just to the pleasures of fresh company, but to the exquisite joy of knowing that other worlds and other lives are part of one’s own world and one’s own life. How it changes us to believe that the unknown other is not an enemy but a friend! To paraphrase Wayne Booth, whose work on moral fiction Robie Macauley so pointedly explores for us, all these others are the company we rejoice to keep.
And what company our fiction writers are! Think what they do for us. They open our eyes. They draw words from silence. They nourish our sense of the unity of existence, but they also make us hungry for its open expression. Fiction writers keep us human in this way, for this is what we human beings have always been. From the very beginning the narrative impulse, the irresistible urge to say what happened or what might have happened, has been the heartbeat of human life.
Writers are privileged to be its servants and, more rarely, its prophets, but writers know better than anyone that the gift for narrative belongs as the defining note to every human person. That is why we all love it. That is why we regard it as our absolute. That is why we defend it from trivializers and censors, including ourselves. That is why we trust it with our lives. And that is why some of us see in the process of fiction the ultimate morality, and why, even, some of us see in it the guiding, shaping, gentle hand — like a writer’s own — of God. We call God — and what could be greater praise? — the Author of Creation, which we praise in turn, some of us, by calling it God’s Word.
