Moral Complexity (3 of 6)

I wrote in the previous crumb that the classical world possesses “a strange moral complexity,” but maybe this phrase is wrong. Moral complexity is a feature of the novel or the high-brow film. What the classical world had is something different, something inherent to the action.

However deeply moral ambiguity may be woven into the action of a novel, it is always still in some sense an ingredient that has been added to the batter, which could as easily have been left out. However subtle, however nuanced it may be, one always feels the novelist’s outlook, like the judgment of God. Even when it is silent— when the writer does not tell us what to think— one feels this silence as a positive presence, a holding back. Another way to put this is to say that, to achieve moral complexity, the novelist must present us with complex people; moral ambiguity can occur only if the actions are themselves ambiguous. If she wishes judgment to be suspended, she must baffle it; she must lead it one way and then another and then another, until it grows tired and confused—for it will look upon her work. Moral judgment is, I think, close to the essence of the novel.

The turn towards modernism in the novel is in part about this effort to baffle judgment. In the novel of the early and middle 19th century— in Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës—good and evil stand out vividly, as if the whole story were conjured in order to reveal them. With George Eliot, judgment becomes more complex, more difficult; with James more difficult still; with Woolf almost impossible. You can see this shift at work between War and Peace and Anna Karenina. In the former, there are characters we can solidly despise; by the latter, this simple pleasure is denied us in favor of something which we take— which I do take— to be more true, more wise.

But if this complexity and ambiguity is a feature of reality, then it is strange that it had to be developed in the novel and was achieved not through a tearing away of pretense, but through a process of refinement and intricate construction, through a virtuosic artifice, which (as in James) wove of words a web that could hardly be disentangled to find the kernel of definite judge-able meaning swathed within; or (as in Eliot and Tolstoy) developed perspective taking and subjectivity to an immensity that overwhelmed the faculties of judgment. The world, by its nature and our own, comes before our judgments of it, is independent of them; this quality could not be carried into the novel. As substitute, the novel can offer us only the state that comes after judgment, when judgment has come and had its say and then had it again and again until it has spoken so much that it is no longer clear what it has said.

Compare this to the moral quality of the Homeric epics and classical mythology. The passions of that world and the often violent actions that they give rise to really do seem to come before judgment. It is not moral complexity or ambiguity that they possess but a quality of existing prior to morality. We are free to judge them, and judging them may even be fruitful to a point; but they have a solidness, a reality that can never be subsumed in our judgments. We may think of them what we like, but they continue on without us, more solid than our thoughts about them, possessed of some deeper and more fundamental reality. It is not that these stories are amoral; it is as if morality itself is still wrapped up inside their action and events, not yet isolated and brought under the power of rational analysis; as if they contain the whole of which morality is a shard; as if what the fruit of that forbidden tree did was not give us the knowledge of good and evil but rather separate that knowledge from the undivided whole of experience. It is this which, in Kierkegaard’s terms, gives the actions of the ancient world their innocence and their immediacy.