Marilyn Edelstein once said that “A book can be moral if it raises moral questions even if it doesn’t provide moral answers.” To some degree this is true and no one is really qualified to accurately assess how sugar and spice and everything nice fits in with postmodernism. Still, we each find ourselves rooting for characters that prove themselves douched in some virtue as they battle with the set of conflicts an author throws their way. There is a reason why, in spite of pride and avarice, women everywhere still fall in love with Mr. Darcy and Heathcliff but few find themselves fawning over Austen’s lackluster Edmund. It’s because no matter what age we live in, sin… is sexy. And so is the overwhelming need to save a character from themselves and restore them to their moral center, whatever the author or reader deems that to be. That is why very few people manage to affect any real sympathies for the Uriah Heeps, Mr Wickams and Rumpelstiltskins of literature, because no matter how cleverly such characters are contrived it is their motivations that we find wanting and the fact that they seldom, if ever, experience guilt for their actions. And that is what a reader really needs, a flawed character that wants to be better.
When one speaks of great works of literature having an avowed moral purpose, one thinks of a work such as Paradise Lost, in which Milton’s ministrations actually manage to paint Satan as the most interesting character in the poem. His reprise Paradise Regained, where Satan is reduced to a petty schemer falls short by comparison. There have been writers (good ones) who have rejected any suggestion of moral purpose in their work. Nabokov, in a letter to a friend, once wrote “Writers have no social responsibility,†and certainly he admits none in his own novels but in dozens of his lectures Nabokov repeatedly recognized his debt to the powerful social responsibility of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Ever since Aesop’s Fables, we readers have cultivated an insatiable appetite for stories with morals. While what we all have begun to perceive as moral may have altered with education, media, globalization and our overall jadedness recognizing the fact that ‘being good simply doesn’t pay’ this simply doesn’t hold sway in literature. There is a reason why many of us employ the expression ‘an eye for an eye’ but few of us manage to feel anything beyond loathing for Shakespeare’s Shylock looking to exact his ‘pound of flesh’?
Literature, more than anything, embodies both the collective morality of the times as well as the individual intuitive impulses of the author that paints prejudices and priorities for each character. Cervantes, in Quixote, glorifies all the anointed aspects of archaic morality through an aging gentleman whose mind has been addled by reading books on romance and chivalry. The glorious wretch rides in search of adventures armed with little beside his wit, his companion and ‘moral center’ Sancho and his delusions of a Dulcinea. The ‘morality’ of this epic rests in victory plucked out of defeat, perhaps the first real underdog story we have available to us, with powerful undertones of Jesus the ‘meek and mild’.
It is this Dulcinea-obsessed fool that gave us the words “Demasiada cordura puede ser la peor de las locuras, ver la vida como es y no como deberÃa de serâ€, thereby giving birth to the word ‘quixotic’ in the English language, which has come to mean ‘actuated by impracticable ideals of honour’. So, it is to the Man of La Mancha that we readers must bind our allegiance for “Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should beâ€.
Maria Amir is Features Editor for the magazine.
Artwork by Yahat Benazir.
