The title of this essay is, I suppose, somewhat misleading, in the way that a title can be, when it seems to promise a discourse on an arguable concept. In this instance it suggests a certain premise: namely, that the question, "What does the author owe society?" is one which still lives and breathes. In fact, I think it does not. I suspect, rather, that its grave can be located somewhere between two contentions: Andre Gide's that the artist is under no moral obligation to present a useful idea, but that he is under a moral obligation to present an idea well; and Henry James's, that we are being arbitrary if we demand, to begin with, more of a novel than that it be interesting. As James uses the word novel here, I take it to mean any extended, largely realistic, narrative fiction, but his view is applicable as well to fiction in other forms and modes.

If a literary work is more than immediately engaging; if for example, it stimulates the moral imagination, it is doing more than is fairly required of it as art.

Why, then, if I think it is in most respects dead, do I choose to raise the question of the writer's responsibility? The answer is that I do not choose to raise the question. The question is continually being raised for me, and because literature is my profession, it haunts my house. Thus, I am moved to invoke certain commonplaces, as above, of a sort I had supposed to be news only to sophomore undergraduates. This was the case markedly on the occasion of the publication of Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools in 1962. Twenty years in the making, a book club selection even before it was set up in type, restlessly awaited by a faithful coterie, reviewed widely and discussed broadly almost simultaneously with its appearance on the store shelves, this book caused and still causes consternation in the world of contemporary letters to a degree which I find interesting, curious and suspect. The focus of this paper will be on the critical reception of this book and I hope that the relevance of what remains of the responsibility question will issue naturally from it. Finally, I must quote at awkward length, in two instances, in order to be fair to other commentators.

The first brief wave of reviews were almost unanimous in their praise of Ship of Fools and then very shortly the many dissenting opinions began to appear, usually in the most respectable intellectual journals where reviewers claim to be, and often are, critics. These reviews were characterized by one of two dominant feelings: bitter resentment or acute disappointment. A remarkable instance of the former appeared in the very prestigious journal, Commentary (October, 1962) as its feature article of the month, under the byline of one of its associate editors. That Miss Porter's book should have been originally well-received so rankled Commentary's staff that a lengthy rebuttal was composed, taking priority over other articles on ordinarily more pressing subjects, such as nuclear destruction and race violence. The article progresses to a frothing vehemence in its later pages. I will quote from the opening of the piece which begins relatively calmly, as follows:

Whatever the problems were that kept Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools from appearing during the past twenty years, it has been leading a charmed life ever since it was published last March. In virtually a single voice, a little cracked and breathless with excitement, the reviewers announced that Miss Porter's long-awaited first novel was a "triumph," a "masterpiece," a "work of genius … a momentous work of fiction," "a phenomenal, rich, and delectable book," a "literary event of the highest magnitude." Whether it was Mark Schorer in the New York Times Book Review delivering a lecture, both learned and lyrical, on the source, sensibility and stature of the novel ("Call it … the Middlemarch of a later day"), or a daily reviewer for the San Francisco Call Bulletin confessing that "not once (had) he started a review with so much admiration for its author,…" in the end it came to the same thing.

Riding the crest of this wave of acclaim, Ship of Fools made its way to the top of the best-seller lists in record time and it is still there as I write in mid-September. During these four months, it has encountered virtually as little opposition in taking its place among the classics of literature as it did in taking and holding its place on the best-seller lists. A few critics … wound up by saying that Ship of Fools fell somewhat short of greatness, but only after taking the book's claim to greatness with respectful seriousness. Some of the solid citizens among the reviewers, like John K. Hutchens, found the novel to be dull and said so. Here and there, mainly in the hinterlands, a handful of independent spirits … suspected that the book was a failure. But who was listening?

Prominent among the circumstances which have helped to make a run-away best-seller and a succés d'estime out of this massive, unexciting, and saturnine novel was the aura of interest, partly sentimental and partly deserved, that Miss Porter's long struggle with it had produced. Most of the reviews begin in the same way: a distinguished American short-story writer at the age of seventy-one has finally finished her first novel after twenty years of working on it. As this point was developed, it tended to establish the dominant tone of many reviews—that of an elated witness to a unique personal triumph, almost as though this indomitable septuagenarian had not written a book, but had done something even more remarkable—like swimming the English Channel.

The Commentary critic goes on to charge Miss Porter with having written a novel contemptible in two decisive ways: (1) badly executed in every conceivable technical sense, particularly characterization and (2) unacceptable on moral grounds, being pessimistic and misanthropic; "But the soul of humanity is lacking," he says, quoting still another reviewer sympathetic to his own position. Why Dostoievsky, for example, is permitted to be both massive and saturnine and Miss Porter not is a question spoken to later only by implication. The critic's charge that her writing is "unexciting" is curious considering his own high emotional state in responding to the work. The charge of misanthropy is, of course, directly related to the alleged technical failure of the characterization, which he says "borders on caricature" in the way it portrays nearly every human type as loathsome and grotesque, with hardly a single redeeming feature. In considering the charge of misanthropy we are, perforce, confronted with the question of the writer's social responsibility in the moral sphere, for the attribution of misanthropy to a writer by a critic is typically a censure and is seldom merely a description of the writer's stance. The writer is usually, as in this case, denied the right to be misanthropic on the ground that it is immoral to hate and, given the writer's influential function, it is deemed irresponsible of him to clothe such a negative sentiment as hate in intellectually attractive garb.

In my efforts at synthesis, I will get back to these questions. But for the moment I should like to point out that Commentary's view of Ship of Fools as depicting mankind in a hatefully distorted, therefore, untruthful, therefore, immoral way, is in fact the view of the book commonly held by the normally intelligent and reasonably well-educated reader of fiction, if my impressions are accurate; these impressions are based, in small part, incidentally, on the way the book was received on the Grinnell College campus, where it was required reading for freshmen in a week of panel discussions before the onset of formal instruction. The book was selected, I was told, because it was thought controversial and dealt with themes of human import. Scarcely three of my colleagues could stomach the book and even fewer, I understand, blushed to inform the new students of its putative unfortunate characteristics.

I turn now to the other mode of reception: acute disappointment. One of the most clearly and intelligently presented of this group was Professor Wayne Booth's critique in the Yale Review (Summer, 1962) from which I quote, in part, as follows:

Katherine Anne Porter's long-awaited novel is more likely to fall afoul of one's bias for finely-constructed, concentrated plots. In this respect her own earlier fiction works against her; part of the strength of those classics, Pale Horse, Pale Rider and Noon Wine, lies in their concision, their economy, their simplicity. There is my Katherine Anne Porter, I am tempted to protest, as she offers me, now, something so different as to be almost unrecognizable—a 225,000-word novel (more words, I suppose, than in all of the rest of her works put together) with nearly fifty characters. What is worse, the manner of narration is fragmented, diluted. Her plan is to create a shipload of lost souls and to follow them, isolated moment by isolated moment, in their alienated selfishness, through the nasty, exasperating events of a twenty-seven day voyage, in 1931, from Veracruz to Bremerhaven. She deliberately avoids concentrating strongly on any one character; even the four or five that are granted some sympathy are kept firmly, almost allegorically, subordinated to the portrayal of the ship of fools ("I am a passenger on that ship," she reminds us in an opening note).

Her method is sporadic, almost desultory, and her unity is based on theme and idea rather than coherence of action. We flash from group to group, scene to scene, mind to mind, seldom remaining with any group or observer for longer than three or four pages together. While the book is as a result full of crosslights and ironic juxtapositions, it has, for me, no steady center of interest except the progressively more intense exemplification of its central truth; men are pitifully, foolishly self-alienated. At the heart of man lies a radical corruption that can only occasionally, fitfully, be overcome by love …

Once the various groupings are established—the four isolated, self-torturing Americans, two of them lovers who hate and fear each other when they are not loving; the sixteen Germans, most of them in self-destructive family groups, and all but two of them repugnant almost beyond comedy; the depraved swarm of Spanish dancers with their two demon-children; the carefree and viciously irresponsible Cuban students; the half-mad, lost Spanish countess; the morose Swede; and so on—each group or lone traveler is taken to some sort of climactic moment, most often in the form of a bungled chance for genuine human contact. These little anti-climaxes are scattered throughout the latter fourth of the book, but for most of the characters the nadir is reached during the long "gala" evening, almost at the end of the journey…. Such a work, lacking, by design, a grand causal, temporal sequence, depends for complete success on the radiance of each part; the reader must feel that every fragment as it comes provides proof of its own relevance in its illustrative power, or at least in its comic or pathetic or satiric intensity. For me only about half of the characters provide this kind of self-justification. There are many great things: moments of introspection, including some masterful dreams, from the advanced young woman and the faded beauty; moments of clear and effective observation of viciousness and folly. But too often one finds, when the tour of the passenger list is undertaken again and again, that it is too much altogether. Why, why did Miss Porter feel that she should try to get everything in? Did she really think that it would be more powerful to give forty instances of depravity than twenty, or five?… it is only because she tries for a canvas large and busy enough to defeat the imaginative genius of a Shakespeare that she gets into trouble.

Trouble is too strong a word. Even if all of my reservations are sound, which I doubt, the book is more worth having than most fully-successful but less ambitious novels … what I hope most of all is that you'll find me completely mistaken in asking for a more rigorous or an inappropriate economy, and that, unlike those who have praised the novel in public so far, you'll explain to me how to read it better on my next try. For now, honesty requires a timid vote of admiring, almost shamefaced disappointment.

Since a useful version of Aristotle's Poetics has been available to us, there have been critics who have been engaged in what has been called criticism proper, the task of determining what literature in general is, and what a given work of literature in particular is. One fundamental assumption of criticism proper is that by a more and more refined classification, according to a work's properties, all literature can be first divided into kinds and sub-kinds. Ideally, and as such a process becomes more and more discriminating and precise, and as the subdivisions become small and smaller, criticism will approach the individual work. Accordingly the proper critic assumes that all questions of evaluation, including, of course, moral evaluation, are secondary to and issue from questions of definition. Or to put yet otherwise, the proper critic asks: How can we tell what a work means, let alone whether it's good or bad, if we don't know what it is to begin with? At this turn, I call attention to the fact that in none of my own references to Ship of Fools have I spoken of it as a novel. The Commentary editor calls it a novel and Mr. Booth calls it a novel and in the very process of describing what it is about this alleged novel that displeases them, they go a long way toward unintentionally defining the work as something else altogether. But instead of evaluating Ship of Fools on the grounds of their own description of its properties, both insist on ignoring this analytical data, making two substitutions in its stead: (1) the publisher's word for it that Ship of Fools is a novel and (2) their own bias as to how the work would have to be written to have been acceptable as a novel. Mr. Booth is both candid and disarming in making explicit his bias for finely-constructed, concentrated plots. To entertain a preference for Pride and Prejudice or The Great Gatsby over, say, Moby Dick or Finnegans Wake is one thing and legitimate enough in its way. To insist, however, that the latter two works are inferior because their integrity does not depend on traditional plot structure would be to risk downgrading two admittedly monumental works in a very arbitrary and dubious way. Finally, to insist that every long work of prose fiction should be as much like Pride and Prejudice as possible is to insist that every such work be not only a novel, but a 19th century one at that.

The Commentary critique has its own bias which is not, however, stated explicitly. It is the bias of the journal itself as much as of the critic, and is one it shares with many another respectable publication whose voice is directed at an audience it understands to have a highly developed, independent, post-Freudian, post-Marxist, humanitarian social consciousness. Neither especially visionary, nor especially doctrinaire, such a publication has, typically, nevertheless, a low tolerance for anything that smacks of the concept of original sin, having, as this concept does, a way of discouraging speculation about decisively improving the human lot. Miss Porter's book appears to take a dim view of the behavior of the race and that is enough for the intellectual journal, despite its implied claim to broad views and cultivated interests, including an interest in fiction. The aggrieved critic cannot come down from high dudgeon long enough to see that a view of literature as merely an ideological weapon is in the first place a strangely puritanical one and wildly out of place in his pages. Secondly, there are a few more commonplaces about literature which are usually lost sight of in the urgency to claim that people are not all bad and therefore can and must be portrayed in fiction as likely candidates for salvation. Most works of fiction, as anyone should know, are not written to accomplish anything but themselves, but some works of fiction are written to demonstrate to the innocent that there is much evil in the world. And others are written to demonstrate to the initiated, but phlegmatic, that there is more evil than even they had supposed and that, moreover, this evil is closer to home than they can comfortably imagine. In any case, since fiction is by definition artificial, the author is within his rights in appearing to overstate the case for the desired results. It is nowhere everlastingly written that literature must have a sanguine, optimistic and uplifting effect. Is there not sometimes something salutary in a work which has the effect of inducing disgust and functioning therefore as a kind of emetic? Had the critic given Miss Porter her due as an artist he might have seen that Ship of Fools condemns human folly, but it never once confuses good and evil. It is one thing to be a writer who smirks at human decency and argues for human destruction (Marquis de Sade)—it is another to be a writer who winces at human limitations and pleads by her tone, her attitude towards her readers, for a pained nod of agreement. Said Dr. Johnson to the Honourable Thomas Erskine some 200 years ago: "Why sir, if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment." In the case of Ship of Fools, this sentiment is so consistent and so pervasive as to make us wonder how anyone could have scanted or mistaken it. It is the very opposite of misanthropy in that far from taking delight in exposing human foibles, in "getting" her characters' "number," Miss Porter's narrative voice has the quality of personal suffering even as it gives testimony. It seems to say: "This is the way with the human soul, as I knew it, at its worst, in the years just prior to the second World War. And alas for all of us that it should have been so." By way of illustration, recall the characters Ric and Rac. I select them because Miss Porter's readers of all stripes agree that these two children, scarcely out of their swaddling clothes, are probably as thoroughly objectionable as any two fictional characters in all literature in English. Twin offspring of a pimp and a prostitute, they lie, steal, torture, attempt to murder a dumb animal, cause the death of an innocent man and fornicate incestuously; they are not very convincing as ordinary real children and for a very good reason. They are not meant to be. I cite a passage from that section where, having made a fiasco of their parents' larcenous schemes, they are punished by those parents:

Tito let go of Rac and turned his fatherly discipline upon Ric. He seized his right arm by the wrist and twisted it very slowly and steadily until the shoulder was nearly turned in its socket and Ric went to his knees with a long howl that died away in a puppy-like whimper when the terrible hold was loosed. Rac, huddled on the divan nursing her bruises, cried again with him. Then Manolo and Pepe and Tito and Pancho, and Lola and Concha and Pastora and Amparo, every face masking badly a sullen fright, went away together to go over every step of this dismaying turn of affairs; with a few words and nods, they decided it would be best to drink coffee in the bar, to appear as usual at dinner, and to hold a rehearsal on deck afterwards. They were all on edge and ready to fly at each other's throats. On her way out, Lola paused long enough to seize Rac by the hair and shake her head until she was silenced, afraid to cry. When they were gone, Ric and Rac crawled into the upper berth looking for safety; they lay there half naked, entangled like some afflicted, misbegotten little monster in a cave, exhausted, mindless, soon asleep.

For 357 pages, a case has been carefully built for the twins' monstrous natures. The reader has been induced to loathe the very sound of their names. Suddenly the same reader finds himself an eye witness to the degree of punishment he has privately imagined their deserving. But even as they are being terribly chastised they demonstrate an admirable recalcitrance and suddenly it is the adult world which appears villainous, monstrous and cruel. Finally, in the imagery of our last view of them, they are not demons altogether, or even primarily, but in their nakedness, which we see first, they are also merely infants and this is what does—or should—break the reader's heart. The reader is meant to sympathize, finally, with these hideous children, but more than that, his moral responses have been directed to himself. He has been led to ask himself: Who am I that I should have for so long despised these children, however demonic they are. Am I, then, any better than their parents?

When I contend that Ric and Rac are not meant to be taken as real children, I am agreeing for the moment with the Commentary critic who spoke of Miss Porter's method of characterization as caricature, as if to speak of this method so, were, ipso facto, to condemn it; as if realism were the only possible fictional mode and the only category into which a long fiction can be cast. But if Ship of Fools is not a novel, what would a novel be? I rely on the recent study by Professor Sheldon Sacks, Fiction and the Shape of Belief, to define it as follows: a novel would be an action organized so that it introduces characters about whose fates the reader is made to care, in unstable relationships, which are then further complicated, until the complication is finally resolved, by the removal of the represented instability. This plainly is not Ship of Fools. Our most human feelings go out to Ric and Rac, but we cannot care further about them precisely not because we are made to hate them, but because they are clearly doomed to perpetual dehumanization by the adult world which spawned and nurtured them. In the same image in which Miss Porter represents them as helpless infants, she also declares them "mindless." The generally unstable relationships which define the roles of most of the other characters in the book remain unstable to the very end and are not so much resolved as they are revealed. The resolution of the manifold conflicts in the work is part of the encompassing action of the work, that which the reader can logically suppose will happen after the story closes. The Germans will march against Poland and turn Europe into a concentration camp. The others will, until it is too late, look the other way. This is a fact of history which overrides in importance the fact that no one on the ship can possibly come to good.

Nor is Ship of Fools a satire which is organized so that it ridicules objects external to the fictional world created in it. Rather, it is, I believe, a kind of modern apologue, a work organized as a fictional example of the truth of a formulable statement or a series of such statements. As such it owes more than its title to the didactic Christian verses of Sebastian Brant, whose Das Narrenschiff, The Ship of Fools, was published sometime between 1497 and 1548. Brant's work was very influential and no one thinks of it as misanthropic when he reads:

     The whole world lives in darksome night,
     In blinded sinfulness persisting,
     While every street sees fools existing
     Who know but folly, to their shame,
     Yet will not own to folly's name.
     Hence I have pondered how a ship
     Of fools I'd suitably equip—
     A galley, brig, bark, skiff, or float,
     A carack, scow, dredge, racing-boat,
     A sled, cart, barrow, carryall—
     One vessel would be far too small
     to carry all the fools I know.
     Some persons have no way to go
     And like the bees they come a-skimming,
     While many to the ship are swimming,
     Each one wants to be the first,
     A mighty throng with folly curst,
     Whose pictures I have given here.
     They who at writings like to sneer
     Or are with reading not afflicted
     May see themselves herewith depicted
     And thus discover who they are,
     Their faults, to whom they're similar.
     For fools a mirror shall it be,
     Where each his counterfeit may see.

As an apologue Miss Porter's work has more in common with Johnson's Rasselas than with Gone with the Wind. As an apologue it not only has the right, it has the function by its nature to "caricature" its actors, to be "saturnine," to have a large cast, to be "fragmented" in its narration and above all, to quote Mr. Booth again, to achieve "unity based on theme and idea rather than coherence of action … [to have] no steady center of interest except the progressively more intense exemplification of its central truth…."

In addition to calling attention to its formal properties for evaluating Miss Porter's book not as a novel but as something else, one ought to stand back a bit to see how the work fits a reasonable definition of the novel historically, that is, according to traditional and conventional themes and types of action. Recall that though the English word novel, to designate a kind of fiction, is derived from the Italian novella, meaning "a little new thing," this is not the word used in most European countries. That word is, significantly, roman. One forgets that a work of fiction, set in our own time, and thus bringing us knowledge of our own time, that is, news, is not, however a novel by that fact alone, but may be a literary form as yet undefined and, therefore, unnamed. For, in addition to bringing us news, the novel, if it is such on historical principles, must pay its respects to its forebears in more than a nominal way. It must do more than bear tales and look like the Brothers Karamazov. It must, I suspect, as a roman, be in some specific ways romantic.

We understand that the novel is the modern counterpart of various earlier forms of extended narrative. The first of these, the epic, was succeeded in the middle ages by the romance written at first like the epic, in verse, and later in prose as well. The romance told of the adventures of royalty and the nobility, introduced a heroine and made love a central theme. It relocated the supernatural realm from the court of Zeus to fairyland. The gods were replaced by magical spells and enchantments. When magical spells and enchantments were replaced, in the precursors of contemporary fiction, by the happy accident, the writer took unto himself a traditional given and the romantic tradition continued in the novel. When Henry James arranged for his heroine, Isabel Archer, to inherit a substantial sum of money from a relative who didn't know her, this was very Olympian of him; at any rate it was a piece of modern magic, legitimately granted to the novelist. Realist though he was, James recognized that the romantic element gets the novel going, frees the hero or heroine from those confinements of everyday life which make moral adventure undramatic. When in the most arbitrary way James makes Isabel an heiress he launches her on a quest for self-realization. He gives her her chance. Now in this connection, I quote again from Ship of Fools:

While [Freytag] shaved he riffled thru his ties and selected one, thinking that people on voyage mostly went on behaving as if they were on dry land, and there is simply not room for it on a ship. Every smallest act shows up more clearly and looks worse, because it has lost its background. The train of events leading up to and explaining it is not there; you can't refer it back and set it in its proper size and place.

When Miss Porter, who could have put her cast of characters anywhere she wanted, elected to put them aboard ship, she made as if to free them, in the manner of a romance, for a moral quest; that is, they are ostensibly liberated, as if by magic, precisely because they are aboard ship—liberated from the conventions of family background, domestic responsibility, national custom and race consciousness. Theoretically, they can now emerge triumphant at the end of the journey, over duplicity, cruelty, selfishness and bigotry. But they do not.

Freedom they are incapable of utilizing for humane ends. Freedom Miss Porter can grant them, but since they are men of our time, they cannot, in her view, accept it responsibly. That is, they cannot make good use of their lucky accident because their freedom is only nominal. On the one hand, history has caught up with them; on the other hand, psychology has stripped their spiritual and emotional lives of all mystery. In Miss Porter's world the past is merely the genesis of neurosis (there is no point in pretending we've never heard of Freud) and the future, quite simply, is the destruction of Isabel Archer's Europe of infinite possibilities (there is no point in pretending we've never heard of Neville Chamberlain). Ship of Fools argues that romantic literary conventions do not work in the modern world, and emerges as even more remote from the idea of the novel than a study of its formal properties alone would suggest. One can see it finally as anti-novel.

In her 1940 introduction to Flowering Judas, Miss Porter says that she spent most of her "energies" and "spirit" in an effort to understand "the logic of this majestic and terrible failure of man in the Western world." This is the dominant theme of Ship of Fools as it is of all her writing. Nearly every character in the work is a staggering example of an aspect of this failure. And here is the only passage in the work emphasized by italics:

"What they were saying to each other was only, love me, love me in spite of all! Whether or not I love you, whether I am fit to love, whether you are able to love, even if there is no such thing as love, love me."