The ethical responsibility of the writer

Moira Gatens

This article was published in Living Ethics: issue 77 spring 2009

Moira Gatens examines the intent and responsibility of the artist-writer and asks whether reading fiction can make us better people.

It is commonly thought that novels like Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn or Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin lent support to the abolition movement that recognised slavery is a serious moral wrong. However, some theorists have argued against the assumption that literature can be morally edifying. For example, Richard Posner asserts that there is no evidence to support the view that studying literature improves a person’s ethical performance. He states: “moral philosophers, their students, literary critics, and English majors are no more moral in attitude or behavior than their peers in other fields” (Posner, 1997: 12). Granting that literature can be “empathy-inducing”, he nevertheless insists that this need not lead to improved ethical conduct because, he says, “empathy is amoral”. For example, I might empathise with a fictional serial killer and learn from him more satisfying ways of torturing my victims.

Posner argues that literature should be assessed on aesthetic grounds rather than in terms of its capacity to morally improve the reader. One of Posner’s targets is the work of the philosopher Martha Nussbaum. In contrast to Posner, Nussbaum argues for the instructive power of certain kinds of literature (particularly nineteenth century realist fiction). Literature, she says, can provide the rich contextual specificity that is necessary to supplement abstract philosophical approaches to ethics. Literature can teach us that values are plural and that moral deliberation requires sensitivity to context. The cultivation of sensitivity to others involves the education of the emotions as well as good reasoning. Literature, of a certain kind, highlights human fragility and the vulnerability of the good (Nussbaum, 1998). She accepts the point Posner makes about empathy being amoral but argues that empathic feeling must be supported by a concern for the wellbeing of others and compassion, or what might be termed sympathy. Finally, she argues that some works demand to be read ethically, as well as aesthetically. In some cases, the ethical and aesthetic import of a work cannot easily be separated.

My aim here is to construct a conversation between George Eliot and J.M. Coetzee in order to explore the ethics of writing and reading.

George Eliot is the male pseudonym adopted by Marian Evans (1819 -1880). Eliot was a central player in the attempt to offer a response to the ‘crisis of faith’ that defined mid-Victorian culture. Although she understood religion to be an imaginative projection of human needs and desires, she had a robust belief in fundamental Christian values, including love for one’s neighbour, charity, forgiveness, and justice. By showing that love, forgiveness, and redemption are human powers that emerge naturally, she sought to demonstrate that the divine lies within human fellowship.

Like J.M. Coetzee, Eliot was skeptical of the way that philosophy and science tend to separate ideas from things, subject from object, reason from emotion and imagination from truth. In her novels, she sought to embody her ideas in richly drawn characters that are, in turn, embedded in complex personal, social, and political contexts. For Eliot imagination and emotion connect us to others; they allow us to put ourselves in the shoes of others and sympathise with their situation. The crisis of faith in nineteenth century thought raised anew the fundamental philosophical questions: What am I? What can I know? How should I act? In the absence of God, and given the failure of philosophy to provide a definitive answer about the right way to live, we must, according to Eliot, “turn to the truth of feeling as the only universal bond of union”. (Letters, I, 162). Art, and especially literature, has a privileged role to play in the expression of this ‘truth of feeling’.

In representing human life in immanent and realistic terms Eliot hoped to deflect reverence for the supernatural world onto this world, peopled as it is with imperfect beings. She does not trivialise the difficulty of this task nor does she idealise human nature. For example, in Adam Bede, she wrote without sentiment of those “more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people” who need our care and sympathy, just as we need theirs. In her novels she appeals to her reader to look again at the neighbour, that “utterly uninteresting character” in order to feel “some of the poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and comedy, lying in the experience of a human soul that looks out through dull grey eyes, and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tones”. Human community is built upon nothing more spectacular than such ordinary fellow feeling.

I consider Eliot as a paradigm case of Nussbaum’s ethical approach. As well as novels, Eliot wrote a large number of essays and reviews. In one of her essays she described what she took to be the essential moral qualities of excellent literature, namely, “patient diligence, a sense of the responsibility involved in publication, and an appreciation of the sacredness of the writer’s art.” Her stated aspiration as a novelist was “to give no more than a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective; the outlines will sometimes be disturbed; the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell you, as precisely as I can, what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box narrating my experience on oath” (Adam Bede).

But it would be a mistake to judge her as a naïve realist who believed that her fictional creations mirrored life in an unmediated or unproblematic way. By the end of her writing career she was pushing the realist form beyond its limits and exposing the constructed nature of all forms of representation. What did not change in her approach to her art were her commitment to sincerity and truthfulness, and her insistence on the responsibility of the author. This does not mean that she refused to represent characters or situations of which she disapproved or that are not morally inspiring. We should recall that she wrote about domestic violence and alcoholism (in Janet’s Repentance), infanticide (in Adam Bede), and anti-Semitism (in Daniel Deronda). But she wrote about these subjects in a way that sought to elicit the reader’s understanding and sympathy for her characters. Her guiding principle is captured in her statement that “If art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally” (Letters, II, 86).

Eliot maintained that the imagination plays an important role in arousing fellow feeling and she believed that this fellow feeling provides the only possible ground for moral community. Her elucidation of the connections between imagination and sympathy bring into sharp focus the importance of fidelity and responsibility in artistic representation. Bad art encourages false sympathy and a shallow moral sensibility. In short, bad art can undermine the already formidable task of forming and sustaining an immanent ethical community with our fellows.

Elizabeth Costello is the female persona adopted by J.M. Coetzee in some of his recent works, including the novel Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons. The first lesson, or chapter, of Elizabeth Costello is entitled ‘Realism’. Costello says:

There used to be a time when we knew [what a text meant]. We used to believe that when the text said, ‘On the table stood a glass of water’, there was indeed a table, and a glass of water on it, and we had only to look in the word-mirror of the text to see them. But all that has ended. The word-mirror is broken, irreparably, it seems. … [All this] looks to us like an illusion now, one of those illusions sustained only by the concentrated gaze of everyone in the room. Remove your gaze for but an instant, and the mirror falls to the floor and shatters. (pp. 19-20)

Despite the critical stance towards realism implied here, Costello nevertheless goes on to defend the form for its attention to detail, for the care it takes in drawing the reader into a credible simulacrum of the world, and for its capacity to elicit a sympathetic response from the reader.

The capacity to imagine oneself in the place of another – even a very different other – is the special art of the novelist and it is through that art that the reader too can come to appreciate that his or her perspective does not exhaust the range of ways of being human. Costello’s son says to a critic:

you are baffled … by the mystery of the divine in the human. You know there is something special about my mother … yet when you meet her she turns out to be just an ordinary old woman. You can’t square the two. (p. 28)

Like Eliot, Costello holds that:

the heart is the seat of a faculty, sympathy, that allows us to share at times the being of another. Sympathy has everything to do with the subject and little to do with the object.

The mention of “divinity” and “souls” might be cause for alarm for the contemporary secular reader. I am hoping that, by bringing Coetzee-Costello’s writings into conversation with those of Eliot – and keeping in mind the backdrop of the Posner-Nussbaum debate – will open up an alternative interpretive path to the knee-jerk reaction to talk of religion and souls.

Coetzee-Costello is challenging the reader to re-think traditional conceptions of good and evil, ethical community, and divinity in a way that parallels Eliot’s immanent approach. If the eight lessons that constitute Elizabeth Costello are intended to amount to an education then we should attend especially to Lesson Six, entitled ‘The Problem of Evil’. Lesson Six opens with Elizabeth Costello at academic conference where the topic is the problem of evil.

Costello has decided to critique the novel, The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg, by Paul West (both author and novel actually exist, by the way). The novel is an imaginative recreation of historical events around the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler. What Costello finds particularly repugnant is West’s recreation of the execution by hanging of the plotters. Contemplating why West’s book had such a strong affect on her, the narrator says:

While [Costello] has less and less idea what it could mean to believe in God, about the devil she has no doubt. The devil is everywhere under the skin of things, searching for a way into the light … the devil entered Hitler’s hangman [and] through Hitler’s hangman a devil entered Paul West, and in his book West in turn has given that devil his freedom, turned him loose upon the world. She felt the brush of [the devil’s] leathery wing, as sure as soap, when she read those dark pages. (pp. 167-68)

Costello finds West’s vivid account of the delight the depraved hangman feels for his task obscene; so much so that she confesses that “she is no longer sure that people are always improved by what they read. Futhermore, she is not sure that writers who venture into the darker territories of the soul always return unscathed” (p. 160). She thinks: “Writing itself, as a form of moral adventurousness, has the potential to be dangerous” (p. 162) and “she no longer believes that storytelling is good in itself” (p. 167).

Why does she think this? How can literature be dangerous? How can mere words harm? Costello’s hesitant thesis is that a strong imagination and a robust capacity to think one’s way into the lives of others – even others who are long dead – can be morally damaging as well as morally improving. We should be cautious about imagining certain things, and thus giving them life: “if what we write has the power to make us better people then surely it has the power to make us worse” (p. 171). In Lesson Six Coetzee-Costello offers a fine instantiation of Nussbaum’s thesis of the ethical approach to literature. For example, the importance of context and emotion to a cognitive grasp of the human condition is pertinent to Costello’s response when pushed to explain how evil can jump, like an electric shock, from writer to reader: “It is not something that can be demonstrated”, she says, “It is something that can only be experienced” (p. 176). The vulnerability of the human being, and of the good, is felt rather than argued for throughout the eight lessons of Elizabeth Costello.

At first sight, George Eliot and Elizabeth Costello may seem to be odd bedfellows but comparing the projects of Marian Evans and J.M. Coetzee is potentially illuminating. What is clear, in both Eliot’s and Coetzee’s writings, is that ‘the devilish’ and ‘the godly’ circulate among us – entering and exiting you and I – albeit in an entirely immanent sense. This puts a special responsibility on the shoulders of the artist-writer: who is she or he bringing to life? What is being brought into existence? There are also differences between Evans-Eliot and Coetzee-Costello, to be sure. Eliot’s project might be seen in terms of an endeavour to shift her readers’ beliefs away from transcendent powers – gods, saints and Madonnas – and towards the immanent sacredness of human life. The divine element in forgiveness, charity, love, and justice is, she thought, true and real but immanent to human nature. Thus, goodness and evil become a wholly human responsibility.

Coetzee-Costello’s historical situation is obviously very different. They write in the shadow of the holocaust – an evil perhaps unimaginable to George Eliot. Coetzee challenges the neatness of the two approaches to literature that I outlined at the start of this article. In some respects his views resonate with Posner’s view, for example, the claim that immersion in literature does not, necessarily, make us better people. But his writings also resonate with Nussbaum’s insistence on embodying and embedding ethical problems in a full context and with her view on the vulnerability of the human and the good.

However, Coetzee might best be seen as a provocateur rather than a moral teacher. Through Costello he challenges us to feel – as well as to think – our way into the moral problems he wishes to explore. Costello appeals to feeling, to the salvation of the human soul, to sympathy, and to the divine from a secular standpoint. Despite some obvious differences, the concerns of Eliot and Coetzee converge on their direct appeal to the reader to think with them about the powers of imagination and sympathy and the role they play in shaping our responsibilities towards our fellow beings and ourselves.