SOURCE: “Morality and Literature—The Necessary Conflict,” in The British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 24, No. 2, Spring, 1984, pp. 149-55.

[In the following essay, Hyman explores the tension between morality and aesthetics in literature, using King Learas his focus.]

When Plato banished the poets and storytellers from his ideal society because their works make us ‘careless of justice and virtue’,¹ he challenged those who love literature to prove that literature was not immoral. Critics have since taken up this challenge, not only in the famous theoretical defences and apologies for poetry but, more successfully perhaps, in the work of interpretation. For critics have been able to find, in almost every important literary work, moral truths that society approves of, or, in the opinion of the critic, ought to approve of. But while most critics have been finding such truths, other critics have been questioning Plato's basic premise, arguing that literature has its own function, its own purpose and, consequently, that literature has only a peripheral connection with ethics. This pleasure or quality has, since the eighteenth century, been called ‘aesthetic’, and the emphasis on this quality has come to dominate critical theory in our time and exert a strong influence on critical practice. If literature has this intrinsic quality, has its own function, what has come to be called its ‘autonomy’, then it follows, according to some critics, that our responses to literature are independent of the moral and ethical attitudes that we would have towards similar events in actual life. If Shakespeare, according to Keats, took ‘as much delight in an Iago as an Imogen’, and could take ‘delight’ in what ‘shocks the virtuous philosopher’,² perhaps his readers should also. As one of the leading Shakespearean critics in the first half of our century has said, we can best appreciate Shakespeare if we divorce the feelings that arise from the incidents in his plays from the theoretical judgements we would make if these same incidents were seen in actual life:

We shall gain nothing by applying to the delicate symbols of the poet's imagination the rough machinery of an ethical philosophy created to control the turbulences of actual life. Thus, when a critic adopts the ethical attitude, we shall generally find that he is unconsciously lifting the object of his attention from his setting and regarding him as actually alive.³

And many critics have since attempted, both in theory and in practice, to direct our responses to the experience created by the writer's words rather than to what, in T. S. Eliot's words, ‘was not in existence before the poem was completed’.⁴ More recent critical theory, particularly deconstruction, by emphasizing the poem's resistance to meaning, its aporias and negative moments that contradict its apparent meaning, has made it even more difficult to bring our moral attitudes into the literary experience. If Iago and Imogen stand for the opposite of what they affirm, (as well as for what they affirm), how can we judge them at all? How can we judge any character or any action if we cannot confine these characters and actions to any fixed meaning?

But, and this is a less obvious but more important point, if we find it more difficult than ever to make our moral values an intrinsic part of the literary experience, it is also more difficult not to do so. For, if contemporary criticism has made it impossible to arrive at fixed, unambiguous and objective meanings, the same critical probing has also prevented us from regarding the text as an autonomous object, independent of our own needs as individuals and as members of interpretative communities. If the words in a poem or in a novel create their own world and do not serve as mirrors of one already in existence, the world that is being created on the page makes sense to us only by means of the conventions and habits that are present before the work was ever begun. One can write, obviously enough, ‘only within the context of a system of enabling conventions … conventions which the author may work against … but which are the possibility of his discourse’.⁵ Much as Iago is meant to disturb and challenge the ethical attitudes we bring to the play from ordinary life, we would not understand him at all unless Shakespeare's words were also part of our ordinary language, suggesting feelings and values that existed before Othello was created. We cannot get inside the poem without bringing the outside world with us, any more than the poet can.

What we can do, as I hope to show here, is to accept our moral attitudes and judgements as part of the literary response, even as we allow this literary response to resist these judgements. This conflict between our ethical and literary attitudes should not be resolved but, instead, seen as necessary to a full appreciation of the literary work. What such a solution to the problem would mean in practice can best be seen by a discussion of King Lear, in which I want to show how the literary power of this play depends on the fact that neither our aesthetic nor our ethical feelings are subordinated to the other.

I start with a brief passage from Lear's long tirade on the impossibility of judging human conduct:

I pardon that man's life. What was thy cause?
Adultery?
Thou shalt not die, die for adultery? No:
The wren goes to’t, and the small gilded fly
Does lecher in my sight

(IV, 6, 109-113).

There is undoubtedly a moral significance in these lines, just as there is in the entire speech; although these lines deny that we can make moral judgements, the basis for such a conclusion is itself a moral judgement, namely, that human sexuality is animal-like. But even if we were to come to some agreement as to the moral message, we would still have to decide just how this moral, whatever it is, is related to the poetic power of the passage. Does the passage gain its literary effectiveness because Lear is telling us some deep truth about moral judgement or about human sexuality? And if not, must we ignore the moral to get at the poetry?

Formalist criticism often does so, as when George Barker argues that Shakespeare is not so much concerned with the truth of these remarks as with a ‘delight’ in his ability to create these images of ‘evil, ugliness and despair’, that ‘Beneath the surface disgust of these lines a sort of gibbering delight burns at having put the monstrous idea down on paper’.⁶ Barker is right, I believe, in emphasizing the delight that most readers do and should experience, even if the equating of human and animal sexuality shocks our moral philosophy. But by placing the ‘disgust’ on the ‘surface’, Barker is also implying that the ‘ugliness’ and ‘disgust’ normally associated with the copulation of wrens and flies is somehow transformed by Shakespeare's poetic power into something rich and strange.

And here, I believe, we arrive at a serious difficulty, since we would not have the ‘poetry’ if the ugliness and disgust that are attached to the images were not there to be transfigured. The ugliness and disgust associated with the images, as well as any disagreement that we may very well have with Lear's amoral attitude, resist being transfigured. And there can be no poetic power without this resistance. To forget the ugliness and disgust that we associate with the images in actual life, as well as to ignore our own belief that human sexuality must be judged differently from the sexuality of animals, would result in the loss of that very resistance that is necessary to create the poetic current. As Nelson Goodman has said, ‘metaphor is an affair between a predicate with a past and an object that yields while protesting’.⁷ The success of the metaphor depends as much on the force of the protest as on its willingness to yield. The poetic experience depends on our recognizing the subject-matter and our attitudes towards it before it becomes a part of the poem, as well as on its transformation by the poem.

Furthermore, and this is my main point, this subverting of our ethical judgements by the poem or the play, and their resistance to such subversion—the reassertion of their autonomy, even as they are being transfigured into poetry, must take place simultaneously. And it is here that deconstruction can help us. For one of the chief values of recent deconstructionist theories is their ability to capture the indeterminate and contradictory feelings that pervade our responses to literature. As J. Hillis Miller has said, deconstruction

encounters always, if it is carried far enough, some mode of oscillation. In this oscillation two genuine insights into literature in general and into a given text in particular, inhibit, subvert, and undercut one another. This inhibition makes it impossible for either insight to function as a firm resting place, the end point of analysis.⁸

In the context of this paper, the moralist's emphasis on holding on to our moral values while responding to literature and the formalist's emphasis on the transformative power of literature, what Keats called ‘the excellence of every Art’ in ‘its intensity’ of ‘making all disagreeables evaporate’,⁹ are both genuine insights. But we must also accept their mutual subversion, if we are to do justice to the relationship between them. To follow one path and then another, to refuse to accept their inherent conflict results, paradoxically enough, in a weakening of both the moral and the aesthetic dimensions.

Even as thoughtful a critic as Northrop Frye, who is determined to uphold both values, the moral as well as the aesthetic, who wants to hold on to the autonomy of literature while seeing it as part of a moral universe, cannot do so; and he cannot do so because he is unwilling to recognize that the two values are constantly subverting each other. Tragedy, Frye argues

cannot be moralized or contained within any conceptual world view. A tragic hero is a tragic hero whether he is a good or bad man; a tragic action is a tragic action whether it seems to us admirable or villainous, inevitable or arbitrary. And while a religious or philosophic system … may find a place for tragedy, and so make it part of a larger and less tragic whole, it can never absorb the kind of experience that tragedy represents.¹⁰

But Frye seems to sense that we cannot simply push aside our ethical feelings while responding to tragedy, and midway in his essay he shifts his argument. If we cannot impose our ethical judgements on tragic heroes, perhaps we can see the ethics of the heroes as somehow being ours also, at some unconscious level. ‘Every man lives, or would like to live, by the self-destroying passions that are most clearly revealed in the archaic settings of Shakespeare's tragedies’ (p. 33). This approach is ingenious, in so far as it seems to enable us to have our cake and eat it, that is, to enter fully into the feelings of a Lear even in his most extravagant violations of ethical behaviour, while maintaining a connection with our own feelings. But there are at least two serious weaknesses in such an approach: One is the assumption that we can translate the complexity of all of Lear's speeches to some category, such as ‘self-destroying’ without impoverishing the literary experience. Secondly, Frye would deny the reader the exercise of his or her own moral feelings. Suppose we are conscious only of our disapproval of Lear's conduct when, let us say, he curses his daughters so as to reveal not only his sense of betrayal but his hatred of life itself, particularly sexuality. Must we assume that our moral shock is only on the surface, and that we all, deep down in our unconscious, have the same death drive, ‘the self-destroying passions’ of Lear (or Coriolanus or Richard III)? Such an assertion about all readers is surely beyond the scope of literary criticism.

A more recent attempt to do justice to both the ethical and aesthetic dimensions in a literary work is that of a philosopher, Stephen David Ross, who also argues, as I do, that ethical and ‘aesthetic considerations stand in permanent tension in art’.¹¹ But Ross is still so concerned with preserving the autonomy of the work of art, what he calls its ‘sovereignty’, that although he grants that the terrible events involving Lear and Gloucester ‘are made more powerful and vivid’ by the ‘artist's unique style’, he claims that the events are ‘transmuted from a moral to an artistic function, where the sovereignty of the work and not our actions and experiences is made predominant’ (150). But if the terror that belongs to these events in the real world are made ‘more powerful and vivid’ by the dramatic and poetic power of the writer, how can their moral function—the horror we feel at the blinding of Gloucester—be transmuted into an ‘artistic function’? Only, I believe, if we regard the artistic function, the dramatic experience, as including and encompassing, even while it is transmuting, this moral sense of outrage. Or, as Miller has explained this activity, deconstruction ‘inevitably constructs again in a different form what it deconstructs. … Rather than surveying the text with sovereign command from outside, it remains caught within the activity of the text it retraces’ (p. 251).¹² In the present context, this oscillation between the destructive and constructive aspects of deconstruction should allow the transfiguring power of the lines to subvert and undermine the moral values that we bring to the play, while allowing these values to resist such transfiguration. A recent comment on deconstruction by Douglas Atkins is particularly appropriate here: ‘Mutually dependent on language, critic and text question each other, read each other. They are thus caught in an inevitable and ceaseless oscillation in which neither text nor critic dominates. …’¹³

And it is precisely this desire to put a stop to this ‘ceaseless oscillation’, to escape from rather than be ‘caught within the activity of the text’, that causes even some of the most thoughtful critics of King Lear to sacrifice either our own moral values or the power of Shakespeare's language to undermine these values. We have already seen how a desire to come to rest in the formal design or the transformative power of the play has forced Barker, Frye and Ross to neglect the moral values that are, or at least should be, part of our literary response. The moralist critics, as might be expected, must neglect or subordinate the fact that the poetic and dramatic power of King Lear is continually subverting any moral judgements. Rosalie Colie has tried to escape this dilemma by granting that the morality of the play is continually subverted by irony and paradox. But she still believes that we can find harmony rather than opposition between the dramatic power of the play and the moral truth that we hold apart from the play. Her argument is ingenious. Because paradox ‘questions received opinions’, it is bound by its own logic to question ‘its own questioning of received opinions’.¹⁴ Thus the very injustice of experience forces—once more by paradox—a reassertion of the values of life with all of its limitations, even in the teeth of adverse experience’ (p. 141).

Such an argument seems to embody a kind of deconstruction, to the extent that the denial or deconstruction of one concept results, eventually, in the reassertion of that very concept. But what we really have is something quite different, since the ‘reassertion of the values of life’ does not ‘return’ in a different form, ‘nor does this reassertion’ remain ‘caught within the activities of the text’. On the contrary, the ‘values of life’, the values we bring to the play remain what they were before reading the play, and instead of being subverted by the drama are permitted to ‘survey the text with sovereign command from the outside’. The deconstruction, or reconstruction, that is being advanced here does not force us to step out of the play, but by remaining ‘caught within the activities of the text’, to respond to the moral values that pervade the play only as they are being transfigured.

As a consequence, we cannot use these moral affirmations, or whatever moral insights we find in the play to, in Miller's words, ‘come to some sense of mastery over the work’ (p. 251). What we can do, however, is much more valuable. By accepting the continuous and dynamic interaction between our moral values and our sense of their being subverted by the literary experience, we can do justice to both the formalist and the moralist positions and, in so doing, extend and deepen our appreciation of the play. Another example will, I hope, strengthen this conclusion. The following passage is Lear's reply to Gloucester, when the blind Gloucester asks the mad Lear, ‘Dost thou know me?’ Lear answers:

I remember thine eyes well enough. Dost thou squiny at me?
No, do thy worst, blind Cupid, I’ll not love

(IV, 6, 133-5).

In his classic essay, ‘King Lear and the Grotesque’, G. Wilson Knight argues that the comic and ridiculous elements are so intertwined with what is painful and heroic that we experience attitudes and feelings that have no counterpart in actual life. Our morality would not (and should not) allow us to enjoy the ‘cruelty of humour’ and the ‘humour of cruelty’ that we do enjoy in these grotesque scenes. We cannot, in real life, expect or allow Gloucester's blindness to provoke ‘not only horror but something satanically comic embedded deep in it’.¹⁵ Thus, when we come to Lear's reply to Gloucester's question, our normal, ethical judgement is suspended, since ‘our vision has been uniquely focused to understand that vision of the grotesque’ (p. 172). Consequently, we do not condemn Lear for his cruelty or look for excuses for his conduct.

This is true, and useful in counteracting the moralist critics who either weaken the dramatic impact by voicing their moral reservations or weaken their own moral sympathies by excusing Lear's actions. But to suspend our moral sensitivities, to concentrate on what is unique in this scene, that is, what is created by this particular structure of words and what did not exist before this scene was created, is not only to violate our moral sense but to weaken the dramatic effect. For the dramatic effect requires our moral disapproval. We are supposed to be shocked at Lear's callous treatment of Gloucester's blindness; for how else can the drama overcome this shock unless it is present? And the stronger the presence, the stronger is the need for the power of the dramatist to transfigure that moral shock into aesthetic pleasure. Few readers doubt that Shakespeare has that power. What has to be shown, however, and what has been attempted here, is that this power to take and to give delight in what shocks the virtuous philosopher requires the presence, and not the suspension, of our moral attitudes. We need the conflict between our ethical and our aesthetic feelings to create the poetry; we need the resistance as well as the voltage to create the current. It is Coleridge, of course, who first made us aware of the ‘discordant’ qualities in poetry, including ‘the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order. …’¹⁶ But it is the recent critics of deconstruction who have both explained and exemplified just how we can come to terms with these discordant qualities without either the ‘balance or the reconciliation’ that Coleridge wanted to find. We agree with Coleridge, when he claims that the poet ‘brings the whole soul of man into activity’, but if this activity is to do justice to the range as well as the intensity of our response, we should see it as emphasizing conflict rather than reconciliation between our ethical and aesthetic feelings.

Notes

1. The Republic of Plato, trans. F. M. Cornford (New York: Oxford University Press, 1945, 1960), p. 340.

2. Letter to Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818, Criticism: The Major Texts, ed. Walter J. Bate (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1952), p. 349.

3. G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire (London, 1930, 1974), p. 11.

4. T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticism (New York, 1933), p. 138.

5. Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca, New York, 1975), p. 30.

6. George Barker, ‘William Shakespeare and the Horse With Wings’, Partisan Review XX (1953) 413-41.

7. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis, 1968), p. 77.

8. J. Hillis Miller, ‘The Critic as Host’, Deconstruction and Criticism (New York, 1979), p. 251.

9. Letter to George and Thomas Keats, 21 December 1817.

10. Northrop Frye, Fools of Time: A Study in Shakespearian Tragedy (Toronto, 1967), p. 4.

11. Steven David Ross, ‘The Sovereignty and Utility of the Work of Art’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XL (Winter 1981) 151.

12. Miller. See Reference 8.

13. G. Douglas Atkins, ‘The Story of Error’,Structuralist Review II (Winter 1981) 45.

14. Rosalie Colie, Some Facets of King Lear, ed. Rosalie Colie and F. T. Flahiff (Toronto, 1974), p. 119.

15. G. Wilson Knight, Wheel of Fire (London, 1930, 1974), p. 168.

16. Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIV.