“If art does not extend the sympathies, it does nothing morally.” In saying this, the nineteenth century writer George Eliot made two assumptions: that morality is essential to art, and that sympathy is the key to morality. How valid are these assumptions when applied to the work of modern writers?
The key to moral life is that nobody is quite sure what it is, but art profits from morality’s breadth as much as it adds to its depth. It is generally agreed that a “moral” act is roughly equivalent to an act that a person “should” perform, and that a moral person acts in the interests of other people, but beyond that there is very little fixity, and the morality of George Eliot’s time was quite different from that of our own. Art has also changed, in its form and its content, and the writing of modern authors is noticeably different from George Eliot’s efforts. If she says different things from modern authors, however, and if she says them in different ways, she still speaks our language, and her time is not so distant that we cannot understand what she means when she writes about art, sympathy and morality.
“Sympathy” can refer to a number of different human qualities. It can denote intellectual understanding, as well as a considered awareness of other people’s social, cultural or personal condition. It can also mean something more emotional: an intense and unexamined sensitivity to other people’s suffering, and an attended desire to ease or comfort them. Thirdly, it can refer to an imaginative faculty, a talent for recalling, picturing and re-enacting the experiences of real or fictional people involved in real or fictional events, and this capacity for vicarious experience, a mental figuring-forth, is the kind of sympathy most relevant to art. Artists are measured largely by their skill in deploying it, and the experience of art relies for its success on the readers’ ability to reproduce the imaginative act. Art, Plato argued, is a kind of drug: “even the best of us enjoy it and get carried away with our feelings”
[1]; and if we cannot quite agree with his tone then we can all agree with his observation. Art conditions feeling, but it also conditions thought, both by giving readers matter upon which to exercise their intellect and by setting pictures in their minds. “Through images”, wrote Salman Rushdie, “we seek to comprehend the world.”
[2] Ludwig Wittgenstein, had a similar idea: “What I invent”, he wrote, “are new similes,”
[3] and if pictures can shape the minds of logicians then their tools are all the more effective on the softer tissues of ordinary thinkers. It is clear from these observations how art might have moral force: for, if correct thought promotes correct action, then art can promote good acts, and if people can feel the vicissitudes of other people through art as keenly as they feel their own, then they are more likely to act in each other’s interests. Further, when art and sympathy do not serve these ends we are less likely to call them “art” and “sympathy.” A sympathiser who expresses tender regard for the sufferings of others, but does nothing to ease them, is looked upon with a little distaste, and their sympathy seen as affected or self-serving; and a novel that seeks purely to entertain is unlikely to be called “art.” “Bad literature of the sort called amusement”, wrote Eliot, “is spiritual gin”
[4], and although we might express the idea differently, we can still recognise its truth. In Philip Sydney’s undying phrase, the purpose of art is “to teach and to delight”, and there is as much reason to demand the former as there is to desire the latter.
All of this is commonplace, but it also has complications, complications that Eliot may not have foreseen, that modern writers have spent a number of decades trying to describe and understand, and that have their origins in more general developments in political, cultural and social life in the decades since Eliot’s career. For one thing, we are less inclined than Eliot to express unbounded confidence in the decrees of Duty, or in the existence of an inviolable moral order. In 1882, two years after Eliot’s demise, God was pronounced dead. Eliot, who had more sympathy for people than deities
[5], might have agreed quite happily with Nietzsche’s aphorism; but the elimination of God, for Nietzsche, was not the point. The possibilities that this opened up, the thrills and dangers of a Godless world, were the more interesting things, and they were enough to send lunatics running screaming through the market place. They were enough, a century later, to produce the dark and vivid world of Anthony Burgess’s Clockwork Orange, and in this world Eliot’s nineteenth century mores are opened up by a very keen and thorough knife.
A second book, a second set of concerns, and a second kind of question, directed at both Eliot and the modern world, are furnished by a second modern author, Yann Martel. Martel is a traveller of the body is much as of the mind, and his diversity of interest, manifested in the award-winning Life of Pi, is representative of one of the more conspicuous and interesting trends in modern writing. As Eliot saw, sympathy is useless unless it means a transcending of difference, a connection between us and those people who “differ from [ourselves] in everything but the broad fact of being struggling, erring human creatures.”
[6] Today, however, “difference” means a little more, and ranges a little wider, than it did in Eliot’s time, and the broader terrain of modern-day writing has its own heights and pitfalls, some of which Martel navigates successfully and some of which he does not. Like A Clockwork Orange, Life of Pi shows that modern writers, despite new interests and new complications, are still preoccupied with morality, with how people should think and live, and that art’s capacity to “extend the sympathies” is still the key to its moral force.
Alex, the eloquent and blasphemous hero of Anthony Burgess’ novel, would not have pleased George Eliot. “It is for art to present images of a lovelier order than the actual”, she writes, “gently winning the affections, and so determining the taste.”
[7] The dystopia of A Clockwork Orange does the opposite: Duty is as absent as God, and the vacuum they leave behind sucks in all kinds of depravity, from petty theft to murder, from pornography to rape, and the book seems as morally indifferent as Alex himself. Nevertheless, it is a moral book, and it is precisely its lack of clear moralising that gives it it’s moral impact. Its force is in its scepticism: it goes to the extremes of amorality in order to strengthen and clarify the morality that its narrator shuns, and it does this in two ways: firstly, by showing readers a world without sympathy; secondly, by showing how sympathy can force such a world into a less monstrous shape.
Alex is a criminal because he enjoys it. Violence keeps him tense and active, sex is a splendid release, and sex and violence together are “gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh.”
[8] He is free to enjoy these things because there is nothing to stop him, no divine, social or parental buffers to soften his coarser and more antisocial instincts. He has no deep feelings for his “droogs”; he is unaffected by his counsellor because he is indifferent to the older man’s opinion; his family fails to restrain him because his “P & M” earn only his contempt; and he can assault a wife in front of her husband because he is unaffected by the suffering of either. He injures others because he is unmoved by their injuries: he is amoral because he has no sympathy.
Eventually Alex’s luck runs out, of course, and he is subjected to the Ludovice treatment. The Ludovico treatment works because it manufactures sympathy, and here, Eliot’s disapproval would have been most fierce: she would protest, along with the prison Chaplain, that Alex’s “sympathy” is insincere, lacking true benevolence, the “forgetfulness of self in recognition of our common humanity,”
[9] upon which Eliot’s conception of morality was based. It is easy to agree with Eliot, and Alex’s treatment seems little more humane than the violence it is designed to suppress. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to disagree either, and one can respond to Eliot’s criticism in two ways. The first is blunt: if “sympathy” means feeling terrible when others suffer, and feeling relief and joy at charity self-denial, then “sympathy” is precisely what Docter Brodsky manufactures, and the only objection to his technique is that it succeeds at the expense of Beethoven. This is reasonable, but there are more palatable and useful responses, that is to recognise the second of the three Ludovico processes that operate in the novel: the gradual and more subtle Ludovico treatment of life. In the book (unlike the film) Alex develops a normal moral life, and it his sympathy (for his imagined child and for his imagined wife) that causes him to evolve from a barbarous delinquent into an approximation of a decent citizen. His sympathy may or may not be self interested, but that is beside the point; the point is that A Clockwork Orange shows how Nietzsche’s brand of demonic atheism can be overcome by simple human exigencies: Alex’s moral status improves when he responds to the pains of loneliness, meaninglessness, and age. Because of these normal persuasions, he needs neither God nor Duty to urge him towards morality. For Alex in his dark and disorganised world, the process is slow, and Alex does a lot of damage before he settles into his adult calm. Ludovico’s chemicals speed the process up, but in doing so they make it abrupt and artificial and inhumane, and in the end Ludovico’s scientific approach is ineffective. These are the two extremes, as Anthony Burgess presents them. By pointing out the repellent extremes he attracts us towards the pleasanter space in between them: the space where a society performs its version of the Ludovico treatment both reliably and humanely, developing the sympathies of its members as best it can, so that each member has persuasive reasons to act as the others wish them to act.
This process of cultivating moral sensitivities is not a task for art alone, and A Clockwork Orange does not suggest that it is. Nevertheless, the novel shows the effectiveness of art in manipulating people’s conception of right and wrong, and of guiding their sympathies in particular directions. Brodsky’s Ludovico treatment is the most obvious example. Here, as in Plato’s cave, a shackled victim is forced to watch images of people projected onto a wall by a higher authority, but in Alex’s case the “higher authority” is Dr. Brodsky, and the shadows that he projects on to the screen have nothing fixed or immutable behind them, and nothing particularly Good; there is just art, a shifting, arbitrary and manipulative medium that has all the persuasive power of reason and less fixity. Language, the medium of both art and reason, is as deceitful as any other art form, and throughout the text, Burgess makes the most of its wiles. Language, for example, makes Alex likeable. “The meaning of language”, wrote Wittgenstein, “is in its use”
[10], and Alex, whose “Nadsat” words have not been used before, provides a running demonstration of this principle: his words acquire meaning as he uses them, and the people and events that surround their use ensure that their moral import is weaker than that of the equivalent English words. The people Alex meets are, for the most part, dull and uncultured. His parents spend their days in a factory and their nights watching “gloopy world-casts” on television, and his “droogs” are oafs and sycophants. Alex’s fellow prisoners are brutes, the Minister for the Interior is an oily-tongued opportunist, and even Alex’s victims (a sordid drunk, for example, and two girls who share “the same ideas, or lack of”
[11]) are hard to like. It is a charmless world; Alex, with his wit, creativity and Beethoven, is charming by comparison, and because his words have no clear, pre-determined meaning they are susceptible to change, susceptible to the favourable connotations that their user, attractive as he is, gives to them. Alex’s language helps to “muffle”, as Burgess puts it, “the raw response we expect from pornography.”
[12] It is a well- made artifice, and a superb piece of art. It does not show that a person’s sympathies will always be extended in a moral direction (quite the opposite), but it does show how far sympathies can be stretched under the pressure of language.
But it is not entirely an artifice. Alex is not just attractive in spite of his crimes, but because of them, and Anthony Burgess is quite clear on this point: “my intention in writing the work”, he wrote, “is to titillate the nastier propensities of my readers,”
[13] and when Alex places himself on the same level of the reader (“O my brothers” is his standard address) it is as much a warning as it is a plea. Anthony Burgess is not alone in appealing to the baser instincts to thrill his audience, and many works of fiction thrive on their capacity to arouse the reader’s “nastier propensities” without seeming too nasty. The difference between A Clockwork Orange and pornographic art, however, is that Anthony Burgess is artful and original enough to cause readers to reflect upon their nastiness, to indulge, recognise, and consider its place in an ordinary moral life. It is this reflection that makes A Clockwork Orange a moral piece of art.
Yann Martel also has moral interests: like A Clockwork Orange, Life of Pi is concerned with the ability of art to encourage the kind of thoughts and actions that the author considers right. On the whole, Martel’s artifice is less successful that Burgess’s, but this should not conceal the fact Life of Pi, the winner of the 2002 Booker Prize, is a very deserving piece of art. It is varied, thoughtful and entertaining, and one of its main themes is the value of sympathy. Pi, the internal narrator and the main character in the book, is a model of sympathetic virtue. He is comfortable at any point between fact and faith, and his two best friends, Mr. and Mr. Kumar, are at either end of the spectrum. He has all the sympathies one would expect from a zoo-keeper’s son, and his environmental concerns may be traced back through George Eliot to one of the novelist’s favourite
[14] authors: “as they [animals] share something of our nature through the sensitivity with which they are endowed”, wrote Rousseau, “man is subject to some sort of duties towards him.”
[15] Pi might have disagreed with Rousseau on the sort of duties demanded, but he shares the conviction that those duties exist. He is as sensitive to religion as he is to animals: his earliest love is Hinduism, but his zeal for Jesus, Bibles, Arabic, the Prophet and prayer mats is just as intense and just as important, and he seems to understand and appreciate the faith of every believer he finds. Other people cannot, and it is implied (most strongly in the fractious meeting between a priest, pandit and imam) that the world would be a much nicer place if everyone could share Pi’s sympathetic verve.
Martel also wishes to show that art is one of the most forceful ways of propelling the sympathetic impulse. In the “Author’s Note” (written by the fictional journalist who writes down Pi’s story), the narrator addresses the reader: “If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality, and we end up believing nothing and having worthless dreams.”
[16] There is as much crude realism in Life of Pi as there is in Silas Marner, but Martel uses it for a slightly different end; namely, to make readers believe what they would usually read with disbelief, to extend the reader’s sympathies by extending their imagination. Pi’s adventures are fantastic, but what makes them believable is the narrator’s obedience to “crude reality”, the unadorned details of material existence, and Martel’s narration is as systematic, as composed, and as conscientious in recording crude fact, as his literary forbear, Robinson Crusoe. Where Burgess uses new words to describe recognisable (if obscene) acts, Martel uses recognisable detail to create a bizarre and challenging seascape. Both force the reader to think in unfamiliar ways, to “extend the sympathies.”
As with A Clockwork Orange, however, so with Life of Pi: there are complications, and the complications point towards a feature of modern experience that was less pronounced in George Eliot’s time; namely, the problems associated with diversity and difference. There is the obvious practical problem of existing peacefully among different people, but there is also the artistic problem of representing unfamiliar people and cultures without either exaggerating their difference for dramatic effect, or insulting their difference by ignoring those elements of their culture (history and politics, for example) that make it different. The first error has been called “exoticism” and the second might be called “decontextualisation”, and Martel’s novel suffers from both.
For all his scientific, religious and environmental sympathies, Pi is rarely required to make any major moral judgements. George Eliot, writing about one of her contemporaries puts the matter rather well: “he is fond of what we may call disembodied opinions, that float in vapoury phrases above all systems of thought or action; he likes an undefined Christianity which opposes itself to nothing in particular…an undefined amelioration of all things.”
[17] Pi has more substance than the unfortunate targets of Eliot’s wit, but he does share some of their foibles. He is rarely forced to judge people, or to interact with them in any morally significant way. It is true that he spends over eight months in a lifeboat with a large and savage animal, but this situation is too bizarre and too obviously abstracted from the processes of real life, in India or anywhere else, to produce any real moral insights. Further, Pi’s love of God is too broad to have any real depth, and by concentrating in the most “vapoury” and metaphysical elements of religion he ignores the more real and challenging parts. He ignores, for example, the history of conflict that exists between the three religions that he follows. In a discussion between representatives of his three favourite religions, he cannot understand why anyone could be divided over cultural or nationalistic matters, and is innocently alarmed when the three men nearly “come to blows.” He is thoughtful, but he is also a little childish, and for Pi (a youth at the time) this is excusable. For Yann Martel it is not, and his attitude to reason, conveyed through Pi, is also a little naive. “Reason”, he says, is a “fools gold for the bright”, an ability to “shine at practicalities – the getting of food, water and shelter.”
[18] Beyond that, says Pi, reason is dispensable: “If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for?”
[19]. In many ways this is a commendable attitude, and world would be a pleasanter place if more people held it. Nevertheless, Pi misses something out: although people may believe anything they wish to believe, it is generally agreed that people cannot do whatever they wish to do, and a certain amount of reason is required to determine which is the most moral (as well as most practical) way to act. “It is one thing to feel keenly for one’s fellow-creatures,” wrote Eliot, “another to say, ‘This step, and this alone, will be the best to take for the removal of particular calamities.’” In particular, reason can help to solve the calamities of difference. Metaphysics alone does not reconcile religions, in fiction or in real life, and by denying the moral utility of reason Martel ignores one of the tools that might help to ease some of the problems that difference can cause.
Martel’s account of Indian life not only ignores the more difficult and unattractive elements of the sub-continent, but concentrates on those aspects of India that are most likely to appeal to a tourist’s conception of the country. India, according to Life of Pi, is profuse, strange and irresistible. The zoo is filled with vipers, zebras, pacas and golden agoutis, the Hindu temple is described in wonderfully sensuous terms, the Arabic tongue is made up of “guttural eruptions and long flowing vowels”, and the house of the elderly Pi is a mysterious and charming place filled with books, shrines, icons and strange spices.
[20] The story is fantastic, but it is also determinedly jolly, and the author begins his account with a good-humoured candour from which he rarely departs. Jesus’ grazed knees are “fire-engine red”, the sinking ship gives out a “metallic burp”, Richard Parker (a man-eating tiger) is a “life-boat with teeth”. Even in his most hopeless moments Pi is inexplicably sunny: when his ship sinks, he enters into conversation with an adult Bengal tiger; when he finds himself in a lifeboat with a group of life-threatening zoo animals, he gives a cheerful account of the hyena’s cosmetic deficiencies; and, when his hunger, weakness and delirium are at their peak, he conducts a witty dialogue touching on various subtle points of lifeboat cuisine. For a story about suffering, despair and starvation, it is all a little too much fun, and the infallibility of Pi adds to the disjunction between the art of Life of Pi and the reality of normal living: the lead character has a knack for insouciant heroism, is brilliant, or at least highly competent, at almost anything to which he applies himself, and there is reason to doubt that Eliot had this kind of person in mind when she wrote about the importance of sympathy. “I wish to stir your sympathies with common-place troubles”, one of her characters promised, “to win your tears for real sorrow, sorrow such as may live next door to you - such as walks neither in rages nor in velvet, but in ordinary decent apparel.”
[21] Pi’s troubles are not common-place, his adventures are not decked out in “ordinary decent apparel”, and the sympathy that he stirs up is diluted by an equal mix of enjoyment and fascination. This is not to say that books should not be enjoyable and fascinating, nor that foreign countries are never genuinely exotic; it does show, however, how difficult it is to produce art that is both interesting and edifying, and that is as sensitive to a nation’s real difficulties as it is to its exotic charms. Fiction, Martel suggests, is a process of “selectively transforming reality”, a matter of choosing “the better story.” This is no doubt a true and valuable point, but if the “better story” is the story with the most extraordinary plot and most charismatic hero, and if reality is transformed only to make gravity seem lighter than it is, then the lesson loses much of its value.
Eliot has less of Martel’s naiveté, but Martel had a more diverse set of problems. Anthony Burgess had less of her moral optimism, but enough art and honesty to make morality work in an amoral world. All three writers treat art, morality and sympathy in different ways, but all three try to do more than merely sermonise or entertain, and even if they have faults there is as much to gain in their errors as there is to praise in their successes. The world has changed since George Eliot. It will certainly keep changing, and art and morality will change with it, but if it did not change there would be nothing new to write about, and even if it changes more dramatically in the future than it has done in the past, it is unlikely to change so much that writers will no longer be interested in how people think, how people act, and how art can change both for the better.
Michael Bycroft
[1] Plato, “Republic”, 605 d)
[2] Rushdie, Salman, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991, London: Granta, 1991, p.
146
[3] Monk, Ray, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, New York: Free Press, 1990, p. 357
[4] Eliot, 1884, p.358.
[5] Noble, p.72-8
[6] From Letters, vol. III, no.3, 1859, reproduced in Noble, 61.
[7] Eliot, George, Essays and Leaves from Notebook, 2nd ed., London: Blackwood and Sons, 1884, p.327
[8] Burgess, Anthony, A Clockwork Orange, New York: Norton, 1988, p.32
[9] Noble, 64, extracted from Walter Edwards, The Victorian Frame of Mind, Yale: New Haven, 1957, p.278.
[10] Monk, 340
[11] Burgess, 44
[12] Burgess, 1988, from “Introduction: A Clockwork Orange Resucked”, x.
[13] Ibid., ix.
[14] Reading Rousseau for the first time, Eliot was struck by “the rushing mighty wind of his inspiration”, and her moral thought was similar to that of the mud-wrestling Romantic. (Quote extracted from an 1849 letter, and reproduced in Dodd, p.306.)
[15] Rousseau, J.J., “Discourse on Inequality”, First and Second Discourses ed. Roger D. Masters, 1964, St. Martins: New York, p.97
[16]Martel, Yann, Life of Pi, New York: Harcourt, 2001, p.xii
[17] Eliot, 1884, p. 201.
[18] Martel, p.98.
[19] Ibid., p.297
[20] Martel, p.45-6
[21] Noble, p.70, extracted from “Amos Barton”, in Scenes of Clerical Life, chap.7
