The Morality of Aesthetic: Rethinking the Writer’s Obligations to Art and Reader

Marilynne Robinson opened her keynote address at the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with the following: “Gloom is all the rage. In certain quarters, rage is all the rage. . . . I am often asked to
stoke its sooty fires. Honesty forbids.” Robinson went on to make a case for optimism and hope, but her initial point stands. Gloom exists in culture and literature today. One senses an assumption on the part of many writers that fiction needs to be dark, moody, sarcastic, faithless, or brutal to be worthy of the name, that to be anything less than painfully honest is to be somehow less than literary. I’ve often described this trend in contemporary fiction as “psychologically damaged characters psychologically damaging other characters before the whole lot of them are tossed into the abyss.” I’ve seen this gloom in published work. And I’ve seen this gloom in writing workshops. And truly, Woe betide the budding writer who brings a cheery story to an MFA program. But where does this gloom come from? What is it? What desire propels it? And do we have to take part in it to create art? These are questions worth asking.

As an undergraduate, I began writing stories based on my experiences serving in Kandahar, Afghanistan. And as an undergraduate enamored with the drumbeats and banners of postmodern abysmalism, my tales all came out as stories of straight-up disillusionment. I made it my work to capture the downward spiral of a group of young soldiers who were sent to a war they didn’t understand, who experienced and performed acts that frightened them, and who began their journey home with little before them but confusion, mistrust, and bitterness. Early on, I had the opportunity to workshop one of these stories under the guidance of writer Tony Bukoski—an alumnus of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a Vietnam veteran, United States Marine Corps. The story I gave Tony to read represented my truncation and inversion of what I viewed as a typical war narrative—the young troop from the corn patch, eager and dumb and made sick by the killing, returning home to heal, to find work at the feed mill, love at the grange hall dance, salvation at the church, copper steeples and credits, etc. My story had a thesis, however, and that thesis was more or less this: The apple pie does not exist, nor does the ticker parade and picnic. The soldier does not return home and find Jesus. The soldier returns home and drinks. There is no healing. There is no resolution.

My views, though, were ones that Tony didn’t entirely share. I remember him telling me to “hold on a minute,” that he still “believed in some of these things.” I remember thinking to myself— to my own vast discredit—how this guy didn’t understand the world at all, how his views of life, about happiness and truth, were at least obsolete if not entirely uninformed. His views were far too simple, too tidy, too resolved, and they struck me—as they would strike any eager postmodern-in-training—as dishonest. Joy doesn’t exist, and truth exists to be mocked, and if I knew that, then my characters should know that too. I drank and they drank. I was lost and they were too. I was far too enlightened to imbue my stories with the tidy sentimentality my own life lacked. I was also an idiot.

My hunch is that this cult of gloomy writing comes out of a deeply felt but misguided sense of obligation to one’s reader and one’s art. I am convinced that behind the gloom lies a genuine desire for honesty, for a more complete and complex representation of reality. But I am equally convinced that this desire has been inadequately answered.

Poet Mina Loy sheds some light on how this obligation, this search for truth, has been answered by the Modernist. As early as 1925, in the essay “Modern Poetry,” Loy spoke to the problem of mistaking anti-sentimentality for complexity: “Where other poets have failed for being too modern, [e.e. cummings] is more modern still, and altogether successful; where others were entirely anti-human in their fear of sentimentality, he keeps that rich compassion.” I think today—even further along in our gloomy march than the Modernist ever was—we could confidently replace Loy’s “sentimentality” with a word like joy, or peace, or hope, or patriotism, or optimism, or rest, beauty, gladness, truth—and her statement would still so aptly diagnose the gloom afflicting the contemporary writer. The contemporary writer has been taught to seek intellectually high ground, complexity, a depiction of life more “honest” than the oversimplifications and sentimentality of the past. But has gloominess, has brutality, has relativism, has shock value, satisfied this want for greater complexity and seriousness? I don’t think that it has.

As a child, I attended a Baptist church with my family. We were intermittent churchgoers. I was not baptized, but seeds were planted. When I left home for the military, I grew distant and began to mock—as is so typically the case—the faith I had outgrown. This rejection continued into my post-military years, where I tottered into academia ripe for the picking. I was low-hanging fruit. While I eventually found empty the tenets and “freedom” of relativism as a worldview—tempting in theory, brutal in practice—it wasn’t until my junior year that I snuck into a small church behind a park near campus. The people there smiled a lot. They smiled at each other, and they smiled at me. And they had gladness rather than mockery in their smiles. They used words like truth, and beauty, and rest, without laughing. Church became my secret. I kept going. I wouldn’t talk about it unless I’d been drinking. Years later, during a muggy and overcast morning in August of 2009, a pastor in Iowa City, Iowa, put out an invitation for baptism. That afternoon, I sat on the grass by the Iowa River—behind the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, of all places—deliberating. I was praying that God would give me a sign, or at least a nudge. I wanted very much to return home to the peace I’d known as a kid, but I also wanted to be sincere. I remember asking God if this was the day, if I was ready to accept his reality fully and completely and with conviction. In general, the heavens didn’t open. The earth didn’t shake in response. The muddy river flowed on. A red bird landed in a tree. But slowly, it became clear, like a still voice, an answer.

In the greatest and most wonderful irony of my life, during the three years following my workshop with Bukoski I became the thing I scoffed at most. I became the soldier who returns home and finds Jesus, who marries the beautiful, small-town girl, who has picnics with her by a lakeshore in Iowa on a quilt she has stitched, literally eating melon and watching the tip of a fishing rod rigged for channel-cat. I became the cliché. But I did not experience it as such. It didn’t feel cheap or insincere or oversimplified or dishonest. It felt humbling and real and steeped in meaning. It was an astonishing shift, incompatible with all I had written, with all I’d been taught—these movements in my life toward happiness, beauty, and truth, redemption. I now “believed in these things,” and that belief demanded to be acknowledged in my fiction.

Narratives of redemption, just like narratives of disillusionment, run a high risk of presenting oversimplified characters. It’s the nature of a narrative driven by faith to rely on absolute truths. It’s the nature of a writer who has experienced these truths to wish to share them. But when themes of grace or faith are not accorded their true complexity, characters begin volunteering themselves for allegorical roles. The writer, wishing above all else to make a point, forgets to create a convincing world, and creates instead an unconvincing argument. No modern reader wants to spend time in allegory, primarily because he has been taught to loathe didacticism, but also because the simply symbolic character is actually a false representation of life as we know it. If we wish to write an honest narrative of redemption, we must depict human characters and palpable experience, not Bunyanesque slayers of allegorical dragons.

In her essay “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” Flannery O’Connor writes that “the beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins.” It’s through the simple rendering of the senses that the fiction writer can create an immersive story to be experienced as experience. “The fact is,” continues O’Connor, “that the materials of the fiction writer are the humblest. Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn’t try to write fiction.” O’Connor said it. Joseph Conrad said it. Henry James said it. Eudora Welty said it. The fiction writer’s primary obligation must be to immerse, not preach. And immersive fiction has always had more to do with the sound of footfalls on a gravel road than it has with high-minded ideas or abstract thought. But if we are obligated to immerse our reader in lived experience, are we also obligated regarding the sort of stuff we immerse him in? Have we any obligation to our reader’s well-being, his life, his spirit? How are we as writers, fully aware of the pure physicality of our medium, able to speak life into our texts and the lives of our readers?

Just as a life led by relativism is marked by pockets of faith and plainly stated truths—however unacknowledged they may be—a life of faith is lived with much more nuance, uncertainty, and lack of closure than any allegory could suggest. To write an immersive story in which faith is presented as something valid and worthy, a writer must create human characters who experience sincerely nuanced human lives. Marilynne Robinson’s novel, Home, offers brilliant commentary on the problem of viewing individuals—the biblical character, Cain, in this instance—in an oversimplified light:

Maybe sorrow or guilt is simply to be accepted as absolute, like revelation. My iniquity/punishment is greater than Ican bear. In the Hebrew, her father said, that one word has two meanings and we chose one of them, which may make it harder for us to understand why the Lord would have pardoned Cain and protected him, and let him go on with his life, marry, have a son, build a city. His crime was his punishment, which had to mean he wasn’t such a villain after all. She might mention this to Jack sometime, if ever it seemed to her a conversation had arrived at a point where she could dare, could summon delicacy enough, to compare him with Cain. She laughed at herself. What a thought.

Herein lies an attractive complexity. Cain experiences guilt alongside his dread of punishment. But by choosing only one way in which to understand Cain, or any human for that matter, we box that being into a predestined role. And it is the single- sided reputation of Cain that dissuades Glory from sharing the complexity she discovers with her brother Jack, a complexity that may have been very liberating to a brother trapped in the role of villain. An oversimplified character—be he singularly filled with joy or gloom—is not merely didactic, he is lifeless. He is lifeless in the same way a story lacking O’Connor’s dust is lifeless. It doesn’t ring true. We haven’t experienced anything like in our own lives. We as readers can’t know the thing, for we’ve seen it in no part of ourselves.

Robinson’s character, Jack, seems aware that the role of villain is in some way inescapable for him, that he is predestined to remain within that mold even if his experience of himself is far more complex. In a dialogue between Jack and his father’s friend Ames in Home, Robinson reveals the disparity between Jack’s interior complexity and the exterior roles made available to him:

“Let me put it this way. Do you think some people are intentionally and irretrievably consigned to perdition?”
“I’m afraid that is the most difficult aspect of the question.” Jack laughed. “People must ask you about it all the time.” “Yes, they do.”
“And you must have some way of responding.”
“I tell them there are certain attributes our faith assigns to God—omniscience, omnipotence, justice, and grace. We human beings have such a slight acquaintance with power and knowledge, so little conception of justice, and so slight a capacity for grace, that the workings of these great attributes together is a mystery we cannot hope to penetrate.”
“You say it in those very words?”
“Yes, I do. More or less those very words. It’s a fraught question, and I’m careful with it. I don’t like the word ‘predestination.’ It’s been put to crude uses.”

It is a cruel irony that the kind of stories most susceptible to depicting oversimplified characters—a narrative which offers faith as a resolving force—are the kind of stories that would benefit most from a lack of such characters. Through an act of authorial predestination, we deny such narratives their greatest thematic strength, that the omniscience, omnipotence, justice, and grace of God is deep and rich. Robinson unearths this richness by depicting characters possessing actual humanity. They experience a humanity marked by both hope and failure, both iniquity and punishment. During his stay at the Boughton home, Jack successfully restores the family automobile. He weeds an overgrown garden. But his present condition doesn’t negate his past. There is no ghost in the machine. He continues to drink. He continues to brutalize himself over the past. He is, as a character, Cain in an honest sense. Jack is both sinner and repentant, both the prodigal son fit with his father’s robe and the older brother standing outside the actual feast. As a character, he satisfies us. He embodies both disillusionment and hope, boy joy and sorrow, both uncertainty and truth, much like we do. And in doing so, he remains more complex than the allegorical simplicities which threaten to reduce him.

The Bible itself—a text so often disdained by the postmodern for its absolute truths, by which they mean uncomplicated, single-sided, and unsatisfying—depicts a rich awareness of the actual humanity it describes. Like a postmodern undergrad sneaking off to church, Jacob wrestled in that wilderness. After the flood, Noah drank. “Lord, I believe,” says a man to Christ, in extraordinary hope and earnestness, but “Help thou mine unbelief.”

I was once convinced that by simply banging the lowest note I could find—i.e. damaged characters damaging others and falling into abysses—I could rest assured others would call what I was doing artful. I’ve since realized that banging that low note was far too simple, too easy a thing to do. It resonates. Surely. It shocks. It makes noise and gets readers to react. It is “true” in its own limited way. But it is not music. And it does not satisfy that need for complexity and seriousness it claimed to chase after in the first place. Why does the postmodern gloom not satisfy? Why does it fall short? It falls short because to claim that truth and joy and stability of meaning do not exist in human life is just as oversimplified as it is to claim we live entirely in the absence of doubt or sorrow or mystery. Unaware of this irony, the parade of gloom marches abysmally onward—its unskilled trumpet blasts of victory through mockery, its one-handed drumbeats of damning despair, its haranguing, joyless bells—as sentimental and didactic as the over-illuminated progress of any pilgrim ever was. May honesty forbid such a lack of effort.