TOO GOOD TO BE UNTRUE

Why ethical criticism can never be simple. (Wayne C. Booth, Summer 1998, Style)

This essay is one of many recent efforts, by myself and others, to challenge two critical schools popular through much of this
century: those who think ethical judgments have nothing to do with genuine "literary" or "aesthetic" criticism, and those who think that ethical judgments about stories can never be anything more than subjective opinion. My thesis is thus double: ethical criticism is relevant to all literature, no matter how broadly or narrowly we define that controversial term; and such criticism, when done responsibly, can be a genuine form of rational inquiry. It is true that it will never produce results nearly as uncontroversial as deciding whether it rained in New York yesterday, or even whether President Clinton lied. What's more, many of its judgments, such as Plato's exaggerated attacks on Homer, will be rejected by most serious ethical critics. Yet when responsible readers of powerful stories engage in genuine inquiry about their ethical value, they can produce results that deserve the tricky label "knowledge." [...]

Why did the authors of the Bible choose mainly to be storytellers rather than blunt exhorters with a moral tag at the end of each story? They did not rest with the laying down of bare codes, like a list of flat commandments. Though they sometimes tried the brief commandment line, they more often told stories, like the one about a troubled abandoned-child-hero who, as leader of his liberated people, almost botches the job of obtaining some divine rules printed on a tablet, and about a people who largely botch the job of receiving and abiding by them. The pious preachers did not just print out the sermons of a savior; they placed the sermons into a story, and they surrounded them with other stories, especially the one about how the hero himself grappled with questions about his status as savior, and about how he told scores of radically ambiguous parables that forced his listeners into moral thought. They did not openly preach that for God to be incarnated as a man entails irresolvable paradoxes; they told a story about how the God/man at the moment of supreme moral testing is ridden with doubt and cries out, as any of us would have done, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

All those biblical authors must have known, perhaps without knowing what they knew, that serious stories educate morally - and they do so more powerfully than do story-free sermons. Just imagine how little effect on the world John Bunyan would have had if he had put into non-narrative prose the various messages embodied in Pilgrim's Progress.

In short, the great tellers and most of us listeners have known in our bones that stories, whether fictional or historical, in prose or in verse, whether told by mothers to infants or by rabbis and priests to the elderly and dying, whether labeled as sacred or profane or as teaching good morality or bad - stories are our major moral teachers. Some stories teach only a particular moral perspective, one that can be captured with a moral tag, as in some of Aesop's fables and the simpler biblical tales. Many of them teach a morality that you and I would reject. But all of them teach, and thus in a sense they are open to moral inquiry, even when they do not seem to invite or tolerate it.

In the face of this general acknowledgement of the power of stories, how could it happen that entire critical schools have rejected criticism that deals with such power? One obvious answer is that critics have wanted to escape the threatening flood of controversial judgments we land in as soon as ethical judgments are invited into aesthetic territory. Ethical judgments are by their nature controversial: the very point of uttering them is to awaken or challenge those who have missed the point. Consequently whenever a feminist critic, say, judges a novel or poem to be sexist, she can be sure to be attacked by someone who sees her values as skewed. To praise or condemn for political correctness is widely scoffed at as absurd: political judgments are merely subjective. To judge all or part of a poem according to religious values is seen as even more absurd, since religious views are widely seen as even less subject to rational argument.

A second powerful reason for suppression is the fear already mentioned: that ethical criticism of any kind, even when critics agree with the proclaimed values, is an invasion of "aesthetic" territory. As Charles Altieri reports in "Lyrical Ethics and Literary Experience" (above), to be seen as an ethical critic can trigger thoughtless responses from purists who fear that the "lyrical" or the "beautiful" will be sacrificed to preaching.

One of the points we've argued for in our book reviews, to vociferous objections, is that a story can't be beautiful if it is not true. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 27, 2003 7:54 AM