On Moralizing and Morality in Fiction

“The artist whose chief goal is not to make everything more beautiful but to enlist his audience in a cause—no matter what that cause may be—is rarely if ever prepared to tell the whole truth and nothing but. He replaces the true complexity of the world with the false simplicity of the ideologue. He alters reality not to make everything more beautiful, but to stack the deck.”

–Terry Teachout, remarks upon accepting his recent Bradley Prize

We’ve all encountered works of art that suffer because the artist’s missionary zeal for whatever cause got in the way of his or her submission to the demands of the beautiful. But as I argued yesterday, dedication to the beautiful does not rule out the effort to persuade. (For more on this, see my “On Fiction and Philosophy.”) Art in all media, and stories in particular, strives to prove to an audience a certain truth. So how does the artist avoid moralizing?

Teachout continues: “In writing about art, I try never to moralize, nor do I look with favor upon artists who do. But I seek to be ever and always alive to the moral force of art whose creators aspire merely to make everything more beautiful, and in so doing to pierce the veil of the visible and give us a glimpse of the transcendently true.”

So there’s a distinction, Teachout suggests, between moralizing and the moral force of art, a force that infuses the beautiful elements of a successful work of art and gives us a glimpse into the transcendent. So how does an artist articulate this moral force without moralizing?

In his book Story, screenwriting guru Robert McKee has some interesting things to say about didacticism (or moralizing). When the premise of a story, he says, “is an idea you feel you must prove to the world, and you design your story as an undeniable certification of that idea, you set yourself on the road to didacticism. In your zeal to persuade, you will stifle the voice of the other side. Misusing and abusing art to preach, your screenplay will become a thesis film, a thinly disguised sermon as you strive in a single stroke to convert the world. Didacticism results from the naive enthusiasm that fiction can be used like a scalpel to cut out the cancers of society.”

One way for the writer to avoiding moralizing, therefore, is to create a story in which two or more points of view conflict–what philosophers call a dialectical engagement. About this McKee goes on: “As a story develops, you must willingly entertain opposite, even repugnant ideas. The finest writers have dialectical, flexible minds that easily shift points of view. They see the positive, the negative, and all shades of irony, seeking the truth of these views honestly and convincingly.”

This doesn’t mean that one point of view won’t “win out” in the story’s climax. But it does mean that this moral truth, if it is one, will only manifest itself and reveal its force through a spirited combat with points of view that oppose it, but which also seem to have some truth to them. This is the case, at least, in the most humanly complex kinds of story.