Unconscious moral instructions

[sistermagpie]

lunacy helpfully linked to about five differnt interesting things in her last post, one of which led to this really interesting essay about Ender's Game. I've never read Ender's Game, but the essay is basically about how all of Ender's battles are set up along the same lines in the books, and how this all seems to feed into Orson Scott Card's overriding ethic. The author concludes:

God, how I would have loved this book in seventh grade! It's almost as good as having a nuclear device.

The problem is that the morality of that abused seventh grader is stunted. It's a good thing I didn't have access to a nuclear device. It's a good thing I didn't grow up to elaborate my fantasies of personal revenge into an all-encompassing system of ethics. The bullying I suffered, which seemed overwhelming to me then, was undeniably real, and wrong. But it did not make me the center of the universe. My sense of righteousness, one that might have justified any violence, was exaggerated beyond any reality, and no true morality could grow in me until I put it aside. I had to let go of my sense of myself as victim of a cosmic morality play, not in order to justify the abuse-I didn't deserve to be hurt-but in order to avoid acting it out. I had to learn not to suppress it and strike back.
We see the effects of displaced, righteous rage everywhere around us, written in violence and justified as moral action, even compassion. Ender gets to strike out at his enemies and still remain morally clean. Nothing is his fault. ... As Elaine Radford has said, “We would all like to believe that our suffering has made us special-especially if it gives us a righteous reason to destroy our enemies.”

But that's a lie. No one is that special; no one is that innocent. If I felt that Card's fiction truly understood this, then I would not have written this essay.

I can't really add anything to the essay itself about this book, but was really intrigued by the quote that starts it off--a quote from OSC that says:

There's always moral instruction whether the writer inserts it deliberately or not. The least effective moral instruction in fiction is that which is consciously inserted. Partly because it won't reflect the storyteller's true beliefs, it will only reflect what he BELIEVES he believes, or what he thinks he should believe or what he's been persuaded of.

But when you write without deliberately expressing moral teachings, the morals that show up are the ones you actually live by. The beliefs that you don't even think to question, that you don't even notice-- those will show up. And that tells much more truth about what you believe than your deliberate moral machinations.

--Orson Scott Card

It's almost too obvious to even say it, but there's always something flat about an author trying to put across a moral lesson in a book, and yet moral lessons put across are often what make books so compelling. The trick isn't in the moral lesson necessarily being good, but just in its being believed on some level by the author enough that it becomes a good story. A sign of that, it often seems to me, is that you're going to get contradictions within that story.

I remember once, for instance, somebody on TORC complaining about Peter Jackson adding certain things to the movies that were disgustingly anti-Tolkien and one of these things was Legolas and Gimli having a contest to see how many people they can kill in battle. Of course everyone jumped in to tell the person that was in the original book--it's something people often remember really clearly. Yet at the same time you could see how this person found it anti-Tolkien: how do you have a climax that hinges on compassion, even compassion for a person who hasn't earned it and is your enemy, and then have these other guys cheerfully picking off the enemy? The answer is probably just that humans, no matter how hard they try and how hard they think about ethical beliefs, probably never live up to them. They just don't always act according to one philosophy. They don't always do something because they think it's the right thing to do, and anyway thinking something is right usually really means feeling it's right, and your feelings aren't always responding to the same things even in similar situations.

Some people find the ending of LOTR to be a Deus ex Machina. I never felt that way. To me what happens to Gollum always seemed logical and inevitable given what came before, and I think part of the reason for that is that Tolkien himself probably feels it that way. So the ending doesn't feel like the author stepping out to tell us boys and girls the moral of the story, it's just part of his story instinct--this is what happened next. It just so happens that the same man who thought that responded very differently to a rousing battle scene where Legolas and Gimli are just good soldiers showing off their abilities. The same man also could have Sam Gamgee look at a fallen soldier and think about where he came from.

The contradictions shouldn't disqualify Tolkien from saying anything about life. In fact, the contradictions are almost what make him persuasive because he sounds so human. It's somehow better that while we admire the friendship of Frodo and Sam we can recognize a romanticized class system. It's part of the realness of it somehow, and it's also what leaves us something to talk about in the story. I'd say that's doubly true for Harry Potter. There are points in the story where Rowling seems to be consciously making a moral point, like when Dumbledore is dealing with Draco in HBP, even though these moral points don't always seem to be reflected in other parts of the book. But that's not to say that Rowling is being herself when she writes Draco as repulsive and enjoys punishing him, then snaps into compassionate mode when she's making a point like a child straightening up when the teacher enters the room. What makes the story work, I think, is that she does seem to absolutely believe in both stances. If a reader sees a contradiction that's our problem as it probably isn't for her at all. (That goes of course for all the contradictions--our choices make us who we are yet Tom Riddle was a sociopath from birth? Obviously not a problem for the author any more than Ender the innocent mass murder is a problem for OSC.)

What tends to hold this stuff together isn't that it always adds up to something ethically airtight. Ethically airtight on the contrary often makes for something less believable and more flat. What puts it across is more how much the author likes to tell a story, so how logical story-wise it seems to him/her. For instance, after HBP it seemed like JKR really loved the story of the young man who joined the DEs but got cold feet later. She wrote it three times in different ways with Snape, Regulus and Draco. In Rowling's case this doesn't seem to be a story of someone who turned out to be "good" instead of "bad" like a DE, more just that this is what happens when she puts a human character (instead of one of the monsters) into that position. Anyway, it seems like Rowling is drawn to something in this story, but is it because of any ethical point? Possibly the only ethical point might be another way of punishing the characters further for being jerks or proving the good characters' superior choices better once again--who knows? What makes the story compelling is I suspect more the persuasiveness of the emotion in the way it's written. As Card might get off on Ender accidentally killing his enemies and feeling badly about it even though it was obviously the enemies' fault Rowling probably gets satisfaction out of Harry's dealings with his Slytherin foes.

And as readers I think we get more satisfaction out of the potential holes in the way it's presented. It's good that both Rowling's and Tolkien's presentations of the world can annoy some readers or strike the right emotional buttons with other readers. In the end what makes something a good story is really that you can't reduce it to what it's saying (I'm still waiting around for something I consider an example of the good guys much "doing what is right over what is easy" in HP), you have to just dump this big pile of story out and say "what do you think of this?" Then let fans go crazy based on what pings them.

Though I will say, having written this I think Rowling is maybe exceptionally slippery in this regard. It really does seem that in places her ideas about different kinds of people trump the right and wrong aspect, so she really does have her good guys be part of the problem without making the bad guys really the good guys. I think a lot of the time it may just be that she gets a kick out of writing bad behavior and isn't always bothered by it as much as other people. I sometimes wonder if maybe in fiction at least she just enjoys letting her inner bully have fun. It's probably not a coincidence that her protagonist's guiding good spirit is the form of James Potter, who seems to be the absolute perfect symbol of bully-who-will-always-be-the-hero, thus the perfect nemesis for Snape, our hero-who-will-always-be-the-bully. It's interesting to me to try to figure just where Rowling is really coming from a lot of the time, and that's what puts me in fandom. It's cool to try to map out those unquestioned beliefs that show up in the writing, even when they're potentially weird ones.

Comments

Re: Choosing right over easy

[woman-ironing.livejournal.com]

Doesn't Harry choose the right over the easy in PS when he chooses to face Voldemort, and don't Ron and Hermione do so too in going with Harry? To some extent once Harry and co have established themselves as brave in Book 1 any choices they make in the direction of what's right seem easy.

When Dumbledore talks about choosing the right over the easy at the end of GoF isn't he talking about facing the reality of evil (Voldemort) instead of pretending it's not there?

Re: Choosing right over easy

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

It's definitely brave, but it just doesn't come across as any sort of difficult choice to me because we're talking about people whose nature is all about being brave in just that way. When they make mistakes it's usually in being too enthusiastic in that direction. So while I'm not trying to dismiss what they do--I admire their bravery and what they accomplish--it still seems like it would be harder for them to act against their nature than follow it. So if I was going to define the choices that the characters make even if the choice reflects well on them I would probably never describe it as right over easy.


Adding on because I wanted to make clear that I'm not saying I don't think they're heroic enough, if that's what it sounds like. They're fine the way they are. It just doesn't seem like that particular line of Dumbledore's applies to them in any interesting way. It's like where Card talks about what the author truly believes vs. when the author's being self-consciously didactic. That's what that lines comes across as to me. JKR no doubt believes it, but it's not the concept that's driving her heroes who are more likely to create a reality of evil where it isn't there than ignore it.

Which is why perhaps as a statement to the rest of the WW and as a foreshadowing of the way the next year they're going to deny Voldemort's return it maybe makes a little sense. But even so it doesn't really fit because it suggests having the same information Harry did etc. and besides most of those people are just there to be a problem for our heroes who never doubt the evil reality.

Re: Choosing right over easy

[woman-ironing.livejournal.com]

Well, you do get the impression of real struggle and resolution in the Trio's decision in PS.

Dumbledore's statement does seem to apply to those not at the centre of the action, and also to operate as a sort of general statement to the reader. In OotP Harry, of course, tries to do what's right in his capslocks way and makes a pig's ear of it. Then in HBP he and just about everyone goes about doing stuff that's pretty much wrong and difficult!