Fiction can teach us what's good, bad, generous, selfish or cruel.
Not far from the door of St. Peter Mancroft Church in Norwich, England, there's a finely carved tomb with the following inscription: "This Stone is dedicated to the Talents and Virtues of Sophia Ann Goddard, who died 25 March 1801 aged 25. The Former shone with superior Lustre and Effect in the great School of Morals, the THEATRE, while the Latter inform'd the private Circle of Life with Sentiment, Taste, and Manners that still live in the Memory of Friendship and Affection."
I've been fond of that tomb, and this inscription, and by extension, of Miss Goddard herself, for most of my life.
I know nothing about her; if I had the time I'd spend a few hours in the county archives to see if there was any record of an actress called Sophia Goddard in Norwich at the end of the 18th century. Clearly she was greatly loved and widely admired. There must have been a portrait made at some point; people have always liked looking at pictures of young actresses.
But here's what concerns me. I don't profess any religion. I don't think it's possible that there is a God; I have the greatest difficulty in understanding what is meant by the words "spiritual" or "spirituality." But I think I can say something about moral education. It has something to do with the way we understand stories, which is why I've begun with Miss Goddard's grave.
"The great school of morals, the THEATRE." It was possible in 1801 to use a phrase like that and not be misunderstood, not be suspected of irony. The people who went to Miss Goddard's performances would really have believed that the theater was indeed a place to find instruction or enlightenment about matters of morality.
You might not have gone to see a play specifically in order to become a more moral person; the latest harlequinade or pantomime might be stronger on farcical slapstick and transformation scenes than on ethical instruction. But by and large, the audiences would have felt that the experience over a season's or a life's theater-going — of seeing many different stories, some full of sentimental pathos, others bristling with martial bravado, some tragic, some comic — would provide a moral education. That was the assumption. People would go to see that some kinds of behavior, such as generosity and forgiveness, led to happy outcomes and were praiseworthy; other kinds of behavior, such as greed or deceitfulness, led to unhappy outcomes and were disapproved of; yet other kinds of behavior, such as renunciation or noble self-sacrifice, led to sad outcomes in the short run but were highly praised because they led to happy outcomes for others in the long run.
I endorse this "school of morals" view wholeheartedly. I think we can learn what's good and what's bad, what's generous and unselfish, what's cruel and mean, not just from the theater but from fiction in general.
This may sound obvious, but I think that from time to time it needs restating in terms that take account of the currents flowing through cultural life and public discourse. And I think that there are two such currents that have been flowing strongly in recent years.
One is "theory," and the whole project of theory, including post-structuralism, post- colonialism, postmodernism and so on. As it affects this argument, it takes the form of saying that the connection between literary texts and the rest of life is characterized by contradictions and fractures and disjunctions and subversions and an endlessly regressive series of dialectical readings.
A text is not, as we had innocently thought, a transparent window through which ideas or things or events or characters are visible with perfect clarity. As a matter of fact, it's problematical to talk as if there were a difference between texts and the rest of life in any case, because "il n'y a pas dehors-texte," there is nothing outside the text.
This intellectual endeavor is a source of great fascination and enormous fun and considerable professional advantage to those who know how to play it. But to the non-academic reader it does seem to undercut a certain moral idea, namely responsibility. You seem to be able to say things without consequences, because whatever you say will automatically deny and subvert its own claims to truth. When "theory" was at its height, the idea that novels or plays reflected more or less faithfully what human life was like and taught us how to behave by showing what happened when you did this or that seemed ridiculously old-fashioned.
The other cultural force bearing on the school of morals is quite different. I suppose you could call it theocratic absolutism. Theocratic absolutism has been around longer than theory, and its effects have been far more deadly. I don't think you need to believe in God to have a theocracy; some theocracies are atheist. I mean a system that has these characteristics:
- There is a holy book, a scripture whose word is inerrant and may not be doubted, which has such absolute authority that it trumps every other. Everything, even the discoveries of science, has to be judged against what scripture says, and if there is a contradiction, scripture wins. This scripture might be the Bible, it might be the Koran, it might be the works of Karl Marx.
- There are doctors of the church, who interpret the holy book and make pronouncements on its meaning. It might be St. Augustine, it might be the ayatollahs, it might be Lenin.
- There is a priesthood with special powers and privileges, and there is close control of the news media and ferocious censorship of books. It was the Roman Catholic Church of the Counter-Reformation that invented the word "propaganda," and the Soviet Union that took it up with enthusiasm and incorporated it into its term "agitprop."
- the concept of heresy and its punishment;
- the concept of apostasy;
- an inquisition with the powers of a secret police force, or a secret police force with the powers of an inquisition.
- a complex procedural apparatus of betrayal, denunciation, confession, trial and execution.
And there are many more characteristics of this sort of system, which we can find parallels for in both religious and atheist forms of totalitarianism:
Just to restate what I mean by the school of morals: It's the assumption that stories, in whatever form they come — drama, novel, fairy tale, film — show us human beings like ourselves acting in recognizably human ways, and they affect our emotions and our intelligence as life itself affects us. That the stories we call the greatest are great because they are most like life, and the ones we think not so good are correspondingly less so. The characters in one are rich and complex and unpredictable, like real people; those in the other are two-dimensional and cardboard-like — stereotypes.
Now I can't prove this numerically. I can't show you statistics to demonstrate a 23% increase in moral awareness among 12- to 14-year-olds who have been exposed to fiction as opposed to those who have been denied it. I can't point to studies demonstrating that murderers who have read Dostoevsky go about their business more thoughtfully than murderers who haven't. I can't quote official reports on the decline in adultery among reading groups discussing "Anna Karenina." I don't think that's the way it works. I think the moral education that stories provide is a more subtle, fluid, all-pervasive thing, without a precise one-to-one correspondence in any place. And it often works most effectively when it doesn't seem to be taking place at all.
[© The Los Angelos Times, 01/05/05]
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