The
Moral Author Writing In—
and
About—an Immoral World
Much of a novel’s success depends on the author’s
ability to create believable characters in a believable world.
It’s not always important that the physical context in which the
characters move be true to life—fantasy literature is a case in
point—but the conflicts and choices that characters face must be
absolutely true to the human experience. Readers are interested
in characters that teach them something about life and about
themselves. Life without the conflict between the opposing forces
of good and evil, virtue and vice, right and wrong, and light and
darkness is not life at all. Courage cannot be portrayed without
portraying fear. Truth can only be truth when contrasted with
error. There can be no heroism without villainy. The moral
author’s dilemma becomes, then, how to represent that which is
evil to a degree sufficient to exalt the good without offending
the reader’s sensitivity, modesty, and sense of decorum.
Though recreating concrete sensory experience is
the novelist’s most successful tool for producing an emotional
response in the reader, it is not the only tool. In 1781, the
philosopher Immanuel Kant proposed the existence in each human
being of a manifold of sensation where raw data is collected and
organized, by the mind, through the power of sensibility. When we
hear, read, see, touch, or otherwise employ our senses, or when
we experience emotion, the memories of those sensations and
emotions are recorded in our manifold of sensation. The
accumulation of those sensory memories in the manifold continues
uninterrupted throughout our entire lifetime. We have cast most
of these sensations and emotions into general conceptual
categories that we have labeled with abstract terms (for example,
loneliness, satisfaction, love, joy, envy, fear, and sadness),
and these categories can be recalled from the manifold through
reference to their abstract term.
Our understanding of the abstract term friendship,
for example, is based on our experience of having had friends as
well as on our observance of others having had them. If we hear
or read of someone having a friend, if the text reads “she had a
friend,” or, “they were friends,” we immediately understand the
meaning of those words because our understanding accesses the
category in the manifold in which are stored the memory of all
the a priori forms of consciousness (the memory of concrete
experiences) belonging to that category. All of us understand
what is referred to by the word, sadness, because all have
experienced that general sensation in multiplecircumstances and have
retained the memory of the individual sensations experienced in
those circumstances in the manifold of sensation. When we hear or read the word sadness, we draw
from our mind, from the manifold of sensation, the memory of the
category, though not necessarily the recollection of any of the
individual concrete sensory experiences we have cast into that
category.
In order not to offend ones own or, more
importantly, the reader’s sense of decency with the direct
sensory representation of extreme violence, sex, or other
potentially offensive acts in a story, there is always, at the
moral author’s disposal, the abstract term that identifies the
category of concrete sensations and emotions in the reader’s
manifold of sensation. The use of abstract terms leaves the
function of concrete representation entirely up to the reader’s
imagination. Saying, for example, in the narrative, that the
child was abused, rather than narrating the abuse itself, frees
the author from the risk of adding possibly unwanted sensory
experience to the reader’s manifold of sensation. In literature,
unlike in other media—theatre or film, for example—there is
always a narrator available to momentarily switch from concrete
representation to abstraction. For example, the author
circumvents the direct representation of profane or obscene
language by letting the narrator tell readers that the language
just used by one of the characters was “peppered with profanity,”
or “laced with obscenities.” There is no need for the author to
reproduce the words. The sounds of those words are stored in the
reader’s manifold of sensation, and the reader can extract them
at will, or go no further than the category, if that is what the
reader prefers.
Still, it is often not enough to simply say that
someone is bad or behaves badly. Some concrete evidence must be
presented. Fictional characters, like real ones, must be assumed
innocent until proven guilty. In fiction, the character’s
experience and emotional response becomes part of the experience
of reading. The character’s
subjective response can be communicated through judiciously
orchestrated conceptual (includes metaphor and other tropes and
figures of speech) and cultural referents and abstractions. But
there is always a marked preference by readers for direct
perceptual contact with intuitive associations. So, when
an author freely uses direct perceptual contact through concrete
sensory imagery and action to communicate the level of goodness,
courage, charity, or generosity in positive characters, yet
relies on abstraction alone to communicate the opposite, the
needed contrast based on opposing forces ends up lopsided, and a
weak one at best. And since the majority of abstract terms evoke
in most readers the meaning of the category alone, and not the
memory of a specific personal experience and the emotion that
accompanied it, it is often necessary to go beyond abstraction in
order to pull from the category the memory of the sensation
itself, or even sometimes to add new sensation to the category.
In the case of objectionable language, it is reasonable for the
author to assume the reader’s prior and immediately accessible
sensory experience; but other sensations may require more than
abstract reference to get past the abstraction that labels the
category.
It is here that the moral author shows both
quality and skill in circumventing the direct perceptual
representation of an objectionable action by using alternative
sensory representation that breaks through categorical
abstractions and, by association, retrieves the desired emotions,
associations, and sensations from the manifold. One way this can
be done is to use sensory referents to render the results
of an action instead of the action itself. For example, the
physical or psychological evidence of abuse instead of the abuse
itself: the terror in a battered woman’s eyes as she
involuntarily recoils defensively when surprised by the
unexpected sound of a man’s voice; or the metonymical concrete
depiction of some detail of physical damage resulting from the
abuse: a chance glimpse by another character of a frightening
bruise that is slow to heal, or an only half concealed grimace of
pain induced by a broken rib. Metonym in sensory representation
is often the moral author’s best friend. It gets the readers to
open the category in their manifold, but allows them to
themselves fill in the blanks to complete the sensory whole
rather than forcing it on them through describing it explicitly.
The same metonymical association can be used to avoid the
representation of an objectionable action by representing instead
a second action consequential to the objectionable one: an escape
or rescue, or the portrayal of a character’s sorrowful repentance
of a moral sin.
Point of view is perhaps the moral author’s most
useful tool in the art of perceptual representation. Making sure
that the direct representation is communicated through the eyes
and thoughts of a character with a sense of decorum equal to, or
greater than, the reader’s own serves to mitigate the
objectionable impact of a necessary sensory representation. Since
the moral author’s major objective in to portray goodness and
morality through the development of moral characters,
representing an objectionable action through the point of view of
one of those moral characters eliminates the words that the
character would never use. Compare the possibilities of a
narration of an unspeakable action, horrible as it may be, viewed
for the reader through the eyes of a child with the same action
viewed through the eyes of a hardened, immoral adult.
Until relatively recent times, all forms of media
had been limited for centuries to these and other perceptual
strategies by society’s general sense of what was acceptable and
what was not, or, when that was not enough, by what was legally
permitted and what was not. As society’s sense of propriety has
rapidly changed, so too have its forms of entertainment,
including it’s literature. The moral author would do well to
study the perceptual strategies used in the great works of
literature produced during those “moral” times, works that
despite their deference to decency in perceptual representation,
have passed the test of time, and speak as wonderfully now to our
senses as they did to those of their contemporaries.
It’s quite simple, actually. Any work of fiction
anticipates an audience and a response from that audience. The
moral writer must always remember the intended readers when
representing direct concrete experience and must ask the
following questions: To whom do I speak as an author? Who is my
audience? If that audience is comprised of the hundreds of
thousands of people who, despite the sordidness that is forced
upon them by television producers and writers, filmmakers,
artists, and careless authors who dominate the media today, still
hope for restraint and decency from those to whom they entrust
the key to their manifold of sensation, then the moral author
must not betray that trust.
By
Kevin Krogh author of
The Doll in McCallaway’s Store
