korrespondenz.biz - 019 (05.08.2002): The Novel Is Not Dead: Narrative and Access to Moral Knowledge

Perhaps the most salient feature of the novel in comparison to other forms of art is the representational complexity of which it is capable. The ability to represent things is of course not unique to the novel (or indeed, to works of art in general): almost all forms of art feature examples which depict, represent, signify, refer, or point to things that lie beyond the immediate manifestation of the artwork itself. Film and theatre both refer to situations, happenings and characters which are not literally present on the screen or stage which constitutes the work itself; much painting and sculpture is representational, in the sense that it depicts historical or fictional characters or events which we can recognize and relate to, that do not lie in the stone, wood, or canvas of the artwork itself; some pieces of music even purport to be representational, and not merely commemorative, although the exact status of music as a representational form remains controversial. But if the novel is not unique in its ability to represent, it is unique in the degree and manner in which it is capable of doing so.

The novel possesses much of its representational potency because it employs language as its medium of expression. The incredible expressive power of language, which derives from the possibility of combining a finite stock of words in a potentially infinite number of configurations, is well appreciated by most and need not be overly stressed here. But important as this power is, it is not from it alone that language affords the novel its unique artistic virtues. Also crucial is the ability of language to refer to the sort of abstract ideas, in particular the thoughts and feelings of the characters it treats, which simply cannot be conveyed by other media. In concert, these facets of language - its combinatorial nature and its ability to pick out and explore abstract psychological states - permit a range of human thought to be expressed in the novel which it is impossible to capture in other artistic media. Whereas we may have an inkling about the source and nature of Mona Lisa's smile when we gaze on her painting, a novel could in addition delineate the smile's causes, genesis and ultimate consequences, giving us a deeper understanding of its nature; this precise delineation of a network of psychological causes and effects is not possible in a purely visual medium. Whereas a sculpture of the human form may possess a sensuousness or grandeur which it would be difficult to reproduce in literature, it can do no more than hint at anything beyond the current emotional state of the person depicted - a sculpture may go so far as communicating an emotion or experience, but can never go so far as pointing to its causes and consequences, its complex inter-relations in a nexus of psychological states. And whereas music can undoubtedly engage our emotions and present complex and abstract vistas to the mind, it must always fail to yield psychological insight. I am not of course suggesting that the more precise psychological delineation that the novel is capable of is necessarily superior to the sort of sensations and feeling aroused when one listens to music, looks at a sculpture, or regards a painting (part of the Mona Lisa's enduring appeal is of course due to the degree to which her expression welcomes so many explanations, but defies a unique and definitive one, and this is a feature which would be hard to reproduce in a linguistic medium). But what I do wish to say is that the novel is capable of expressing certain truths about psychology which these other forms of art cannot, and that this ability means that the novel has specific qualities largely unique in art.

But what of the forms of art other than the novel which also rely on language as their primary medium? Surely art forms such as theatre, film and poetry inherit the potential to express psychological interiority from language just as the novel does? And if this is the case then how can the novel be a uniquely privileged medium? At this point I must be clearer about the features of language which enable the novel to pick out, and construct, psychological truths; in doing so it will be useful to draw a distinction between two ways in which language can be used: to report direct speech, and to construct narrative. What I mean by direct speech should be fairly clear: it is simply a report of the words uttered by a given character. By narrative, I mean a series of statements which are not simply the words of an individual character (i.e. are not simply reports of direct speech), but which are taken as the words of some agent who has a privileged perspective on events that are recounted (not necessarily omniscient) and whose utterances are generally regarded as having an especial claim to truth or validity. Rather than being the direct and subjective reports of a character ('"Christ, I feel low," said George.'), statements of narrative have a claim to being more objective and inviolable assertions about the fictional world being referred to ('George had been out of work for a month now, and as a man who was used to being directed by others, had begun to feel worthless and out of place in the world.'). Of course, it isn't true that a narrative statement can never be undermined or questioned, and the situations under which this may happen and its consequences raise interesting questions, but in general narrative statements clearly have a different evidential status to reports of direct speech.

It is this unique claim to validity - the authority that statements of narrative possess - that allows them to establish a psychological reality for a character in a manner in which direct reports of speech cannot. If a narrative statement asserts something of the psychology of a character, then it inherits an air of authority borne of convention, which forces us to take it at face value, as a more or less indubitable fact. This is a quality which assertions made in direct speech do not carry, for a plenitude of reasons. When a character in a drama makes an assertion, just as in real life, we have to judge whether there might be some ulterior motive or unconscious bias for painting events in that way. These issues all prevent direct speech from being an equivalently effective means of establishing an autonomous and believable psychological domain in art. For when a narrator makes a statement, a different set of circumstances obtains. We can conventionally assume that things are as the narrator states; that, generally being detached from proceedings in the fiction, the narrator has no ulterior motive for misleading us; and that the narrator, having access to a unique perspective on events, usually knows what he speaks of. These facts all conspire to allow narrative statements to carry a unique status, over and above that carried by reports of direct speech, in constructing a fictional reality.

There are, in addition, other reasons why direct speech fails to be an effective means of communicating psychological truths. We have already seen that the issues of authority and epistemic access are two reasons why direct speech is largely unfit to communicate psychological knowledge: if we, as a reader, are unlikely to take assertions made in direct speech at face value, and if those assertions are likely to strike us as being about matters beyond what the character making them could possibly know, then they will to that extent fail to change our beliefs about the fiction in any reliable manner. And if a statement fails to excite sufficient credence to change our beliefs about a matter, then it must fail a fortiori to change our belief about any matter of psychology. Moreover, for direct speech to successfully convey sophisticated psychological descriptions, the character making these assertions would have to be one who could plausibly deliver such a description, and this character would also have to be given the opportunity to expound his or her views at regular intervals. There are obvious reasons why these constraints cannot be regularly met. We rarely expect to encounter someone with the acuteness of Dostoyevsky or Dickens - and even if we did regularly encounter such characters in fiction, their prescriptions and opinions might sound tedious and inauthentic if expounded regularly, thus undermining our credence in them. The claim is not that it is impossible to describe the interior life of a character in direct speech, but that it cannot regularly be done in the same length and depth, and with the same claim to validity, as it can be done in narrative.

With this distinction in language use in mind, we can see that although media such as film and theatre use language as a primary means of expression, just as the novel does, they nevertheless standardly fail to establish psychological realities with the same degree of success as the novel, and this is precisely because the degree to which they can embody statements of narrative is limited. Both film and theatre, in contrast to the novel, take as their prime form of expression statements of direct speech. Of course, there can be narrative statements in a film (e.g. the introductory voice-over of a film, "It all began one rainy October night...") or in theatre (the use of a chorus dating back to early Greek theatre), but in general narrative is of limited extent in these media, and for good reason. When a character is directly present on the screen or stage it strikes one as strange if they do not express themselves for any length of time, but instead another voice expresses their thoughts; their presence becomes, to an extent, redundant. Whether this incongruity is intrinsic to these media or whether it is merely the result of the violation of a convention is irrelevant to the present discussion: the key point is that narrative in them strikes one as forced or unnatural and therefore cannot be prolonged for any great duration. But as we have seen, it is precisely this kind of narrative that allows the interior life of a character to be conveyed. And therefore, insofar as film or theatre - or any linguistic medium for that matter, for example including poetry - finds it difficult to accommodate an extended narrative, they must necessarily find it difficult to establish the interior, psychological existence of a character.

The novel then, is uniquely situated to explore issues of motive, desire, emotion, intention and action: in short, the full repertoire of psychological experience. But why exactly does this make it an important medium? One of the most important possibilities that the expressive powers of the novel yields is the ability to refer to moral states of affairs in their full complexity, and also to convey evaluations of them. The moral world depends crucially on psychological states - without them moral situations remain hopelessly ambiguous. That a man killed another may be a fact. But it is not murder unless the act was intentional (it could have been an accident); the degree to which the act was premeditated affects our evaluation of it, and the concept of premeditation is of course a psychological one. The act is only recognizable as wrong because we acknowledge that it denies another person of a range of potential mental experiences, the sort of experiences that only a novel fully depict. And what applies to an act such as murder, also applies to other acts of moral significance: to appreciate them in their entirety it is essential to understand the psychological dimension attaching to them, and it is in this respect that the novel can enlighten.

I would like to elaborate more fully the way in which I intend moral to be understood here. I do not use the word in its normative or prescriptive sense, as when we say that if an act is moral it is right, or that if an act is moral then we ought to carry it out. It is problematic - although not necessarily impossible - to make sense of such uses of the word in a post-religious setting, and as such I refrain from this sense of the word in the current context. Rather, the sense in which I use the word moral here stems from the original Greek etymology in which it is related closely to the idea of action. We are all independent and autonomous agents, and as such have to decide what course of action to pursue at almost every moment. In the form of morality I have just delineated, moral questions become issues of determining exactly what the outcomes of certain types of action are likely to be; what tends to result from certain life choices (e.g. of attitude); the ways in which one acquires certain desires; and the ways in which the pursuit of these desires can delude one, force one to make sacrifices, or bring one happiness; &c. The keystone of this type of morality is not that of right choice, but of informed choice, and the approach to determining our actions is an altogether more pragmatic one, largely liberated from concern with moral absolutes.

Given this intimate connection of morality with action, and hence rationale, the novel is uniquely placed to be of moral benefit. For it can widen our repertoire of experience, informing us of the likely antecedents and consequents of a particular state of mind in a way that other media cannot. Does infidelity bring happiness? How does miserliness affect others' opinion of us? What are the roots of ennui? How can it be treated? Is wanderlust a common feeling? What is its function? What is love? What is the nature of the relation between a father and son? Does religion always bring consolation? What might drive a person to murder? Is jealously a more powerful motive than greed? Answers to all these questions can, to come degree, be found in literature; and answers to these questions are naturally of relevance when it comes to deliberating about action. Without literature, without the novel, there is no doubt that our own moral experience, our moral worldliness, would be greatly impoverished.

Ascribing the main body of the novel's importance to its moral significance is a precarious position, for on this understanding it is easy to take a puritanical conception of its worth, and thereby fail to do justice to its peculiar artistic value. Under such a conception of the novel - we can call it a Platonic one - it can be regarded simply as a set of events of moral significance, peppered with incidental or contingent details designed to entertain and further its moral import. Under this conception it is easy to isolate two components of the novel: much of its content can be conceived of as symbolic, that is illustrative of a wider moral truth, while the remainder is given the status of merely contingent details, that are in some sense irrelevant, and certainly of secondary importance, to the core moral aspects of the novel. Under this view, contingent details are only of worth insofar as they make a reader attend to a moral lesson, and perhaps add a dimension of entertainment to the lesson that makes it more likely to be digested and retained. But this fails to do justice to the value of the novel, however, for it treats a significant part of it - the more or less contingent details such as setting, large portions of the plot, incidental observations - as being largely worthless in terms of aesthetic value (the notion of entertainment not being a specifically aesthetic attribute). This view fails to give a sufficiently sophisticated appraisal of the role of the contingent; moreover, if only the distinctly moral aspects of the novel were of any worth, there would be no reason to read novels instead of a moral treatise. But there are many reasons to prefer the novel to a moral treatise.

One unique advantage the novel has in conveying moral truths, is that the truths it communicates acquire a vividness through being contextualised which they would not otherwise come to possess. As adumbrated above, this vividness can make a moral point more memorable, and more forcibly. But in addition to this, the novel retains further advantages. It is unclear that all moral truths can be expressed purely in terms of generalities. There are many gradations of feeling, situation and character, and without indulging in particularities it is likely that much moral knowledge must remain unexpressed. Or if expressed, it must acquire an air of dryness, inaccuracy and irrelevance that a believable set of fictional circumstances can help assuage. Moreover, fiction can help one engage one's emotions in our appraisal of a moral situation. This is of great importance if our moral knowledge is to be successfully translated into a form which allows it to have application in our life, if our knowledge is to become wisdom. In the course of reading an extended narrative, we naturally develop empathy, and on occasion sympathy, for the central protagonists. And our emotions play a crucial role in helping us to actually employ knowledge that we have. I may know, or be cognisant, of the fact that reveling in depression is the surest way to prolong its presence. But unless I am acquainted with the feelings of wasted time and regret that are experienced in its aftermath, the feeling of rejection it engenders in those nearest and dearest to us, then I am unlikely to find the motivation to bring myself out of its clutches. But a novel, with a vivid depiction of such a scenario, can manage to affect the way we feel about this matter, and thereby effectively shape the decisions we make in the future. A final way in which the novel is uniquely situated to communicate moral wisdom relates to the difficulty we often have in successfully choosing what we know to be the 'right' course of action. Although we may recognize that an action is best in the long run, it is unlikely that we will naturally choose it if it means deferring gratification until a later stage. Literature again has a role to play here, for it can make us more vividly aware of the desirable or undesirable consequences of our actions, and it is this form of vivid awareness which provides incentive to act as we see fit, and disincentive to act in manners we regard as unfit. In these and other ways the novel can teach us 'lessons' that no amount of straightforward moral instruction will ever teach us.

The novel, then, is unique among the media of the arts in the degree to which it is capable of expressing and communicating psychological, and hence moral, knowledge. It can do this because of the facility with which it incorporates extended narrative. But this does not mean that the function of the novel is a purely moral one, in the sense of communicating moral strictures which are inviolable and absolute. The moral function of the novel is to be understood primarily in the way it vividly and memorably depicts moral situations with all their nuances, and allows, through the engagement of the emotions, knowledge to be meshed with action.

dgy